Instructors

Conrad Bishop is founder and producing director of The Independent Eye, a professional ensemble that has toured the USA since 1974 (www.independenteye.org), migrating from Chicago to Lancaster, PA, to Philadelphia, and now to Sebastopol as home base. A Stanford Ph.D., he taught in universities for five years before leaving for full-time professional work.  Bishop has been a freelance director for Actors Theatre of Louisville, Pittsburgh’s City Theatre, Theater of the First Amendment, Jean Cocteau Repertory, Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble, and others.  His 50+ plays, written in collaboration with Elizabeth Fuller, have been produced by Actors Theatre of Louisville, Circle Repertory, Asolo Theatre, Denver Center Theatre, Milwaukee's Theatre X (which they co-founded), and many others. They were twice recipients of Playwriting Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. For 3-1/2 years he also produced a public radio show, Hitchhiking Off the Map, heard on KPFA, KRCB and other Northern California stations. He has a 46-year marriage with Elizabeth Fuller, with two grown kids.

Brian Glenn Bryson

Amalia Martin Dobbins received her Bachelor of Music from Bucknell University and her Master’s in vocal performance from The San Francisco Conservatory of Music. She does choral, musical and stage direction for schools and children’s theaters throughout the Bay Area. Recent shows include Annie Jr. and Cinderella at Coram Deo Chorus, Oh Sister, Where Art Thou? for the Ross Valley YES! Foundation, Anything Goes! at the Marin School for the Arts and several camp shows at Cinnabar Young Repertory Theater. Amalia has conducted for Singers Marin, has been the director of the Coram Deo Chorus for homeschoolers in San Jose for three years and will be starting the Jubilate Deo Chorus for homeschoolers in the East Bay this fall.  Amalia will also start as the music teacher at St. Isabella’s School in San Rafael in the fall of 2007.  

Amalia is an active singer and performer as well. Credits include Amiens in As You Like It, Nicklausse in The Tales of Hoffmann, Arsamene in Serse, Hansel in Hansel and Gretel and Julia Child in the one-woman opera Bon Appetit!  Amalia has a particular interest in new music and has premiered several new works including The Descent of Inanna by Marcia Buchard, Framed Woman by Janis Wilson and Jane Stuppin and Itasca by Eric Sawyer. She teaches Primary Musical Theater Workshop and Beginning Musical Theater workshop for Cinnabar Young Rep and has been the Music Director for Young Rep’s camps in 2006 and 2007.
Amalia lives in Fairfax with her husband and two cats.

Lisa Eldredge, Costume Designer
Lisa Eldredge has managed Cinnabar’s Wardrobe since 2001, cultivating a costume collection that bears witness to 35 years of rich Cinnabar drama. As Costume Designer Ms. Eldredge has worked with Sonoma City Opera, Bay Area Summer Opera Theater Institute (BASOTI),  San Francisco Pocket Opera and Exit Theater’s DivaFest. Her professional season shows at Cinnabar include Enchanted April, Cavelleria Rusticana, La Curandera, The Girl of the Golden West, I Pagliacci, The Telephone, The Marriage of Figaro, The Moon, La Boheme, The Nightingale, The Cunning Little Vixen, and Dido and Aeneas. Over the last six years she has had the pleasure of costuming for Cinnabar Young Rep including Shakespearean productions, the musical theater of Offenbach and Gilbert and Sullivan and a number of original works for young performers commissioned by Cinnabar Theater. In 2004 Ms. Eldredge was a featured artist with the Petaluma Arts Council with a solo exhibit of her costumes, photos and commentary.

Jared Emerson-Johnson has been affiliated with Cinnabar's education program
for eleven years. Most recently he music directed and conducted the Cinnabar
Young Rep productions of Bluebeard and Orpheus in the Underworld. He has performed with various Bay Area companies including Cinnabar Opera, Sonoma City Opera and the San Francisco Lamplighters. Productions include Daughter of the Regiment, The Gondoliers, The Breasts of Tiresias, The Barber of Seville,  Amahl and the Night Visitors, La Bohème, La Traviata, Cabaret, The Marriage of Figaro and No Regrets: The Songs of Edith Piaf. Jared is an alumnus of the Marin Symphony Youth Orchestra (concertmaster), the Santa Rosa Symphony Youth Orchestra (principal second violin), the Cornell Symphony Orchestra and the College of Marin Community Orchestra. He is also a composer/sound designer with credits on several leading
video game, advertising, and independent film titles. Jared holds a B.A. summa cum laude in music from Cornell University.

Elizabeth Fuller, besides work as Associate Producer and actress with The Indepen­dent Eye, has created more than 50 theatre scores, including music for Macbeth, Medea/Sacrament, A Man's a Man, A Streetcar Named Desire as well as nearly four years of the Eye’s public radio series Hitchhiking off the Map. She was twice recipient of Philadelphia’s Barrymore Award for theatre music and sound design. With Conrad Bishop, she has conducted workshops and residencies in hundreds of colleges and high schools, with a focus on ensemble creation. As a writer, she is a 38-year col­laborator with Conrad Bishop with whom she shared 1985 and 1990 National Endowment for the Arts Playwriting Fellow­ships. Her solo show, Dream House, toured throughout Northern California, and she recently played guest roles as Frigge in Shotgun Players’ Ragnarok and Mary Tyrone in Sonoma County Rep’s Long Day’s Journey into Night.  Elizabeth composed music for Cinnabar’s productions of The Hobbit and The Green Bird.  She has been married to Conrad Bishop 46 years, with two offspring.

Nina Shuman holds a BA from Bennington College and an MM from Dominican College. She served as Assistant Conductor for Marin Civic Light Opera and was awarded scholarships and a grant from the Marin Educational Foundation to study orchestral conducting with Murry Sidlin at the Aspen Music Festival. As Music Director and Conductor for Cinnabar Theater she has led productions of Menotti’s The Consul and The Medium, Susa’s Transformations, Puccini’s The Girl of the Golden West and Madama Butterfly, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute and The Marriage of Figaro, Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle, Kurka’s The Good Soldier Schweik, Bernstein’s Candide, Ullmann’s The Emperor of Atlantis, Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann, Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, Poulenc’s Breasts of Tiresias, Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, Verdi's Falstaff and La Traviata, Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen, Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, Ravel’s The Spanish Hour, Carl Orff’s The Moon, Lee Hoiby’s Something New for the Zoo, Frank Loesser's The Most Happy Fella, and Leoncavallo's I Pagliacci, as well as numerous chamber concerts, opera galas and children’s presentations. She has guest conducted for Boise Opera, Lamplighters, Sonoma City Opera, Berkeley Opera, North Bay Lyric Opera, Sonoma State University, Marin Chamber Orchestra, Dominican Orchestra, Antelope Valley Orchestra, San Francisco and Winifred Baker Chorales, St. Francis Yacht Club Men’s Chorus, and the Mayflower Community Chorus. She also served as stage director and conductor for the Dominican College Opera Workshop, opera conductor and coach for the University of Texas at Austin and conductor for the Bay Area Summer Opera Theater Institute. Ms Shuman currently serves as Artistic Director for the Cinnabar Choral Ensembles.  

Marcy Telles has written over 100 songs, some of which have been performed and recorded by local and national artists including Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, the Occidental Community Choir, Michael Smolens, Biaja Teal, A Few Good Friends, and Blake Derby. She has won several national awards for songwriting. She wrote her first libretto in 1973 for an incipient puppet troupe named Das Puppenspiel, who went on to win international awards. Throughout the mid-seventies, she performed as a singer-songwriter, opening for Vassar Clements, Pete Seeger, Aztec Two-step, and others. In 1981, she co-wrote and toured with Morning Glory Theatre’s production of Three Golden Hairs, a musical fairy tale for elementary school children. She was, for many years, a program director for the Occidental Community Choir, helping many choir members write their first songs. In 1994, her anthem, “Long and Fine Tradition,” was recorded by Margy Adams for an internationally distributed video by the Women’s History Project. In 1995, “Don’t Despair,” a song written for Cinnabar’s The Snow Queen, was performed by a national children’s choir in Washington, D.C., and that same year Marcy wrote several songs with Jeffrey Gaeto (the original composer for Pickle Family Circus) for a Japanese show called Viva! Musical Circus, directed by Tandy Beal. She has been writing children’s operas and musicals for Cinnabar since 1992, including The Snow Queen, It’s a Wonderful Life, and The Tailor of Gloucester. Two of her children’s operas—Brementown Musicians and Jack and the Beanstalk—were performed for children throughout Marin and Sonoma counties. The Snow Queen has now been performed all over the US and in parts of Canada. She also wrote the script for American OpStar, performed at Cinnabar last Spring as a fundraiser. Marcy is currently collaborating with composer Brian Rosen on Alice, a new musical for Cinnabar Young Rep, based on the children’s classic Alice in Wonderland. Alice isslated to premiere at the Petaluma Summer Music and Theater Festival in 2008.

Arte Whyte has studied at the Drama Studio London at Berkeley, SF State University and U.C. Berkeley. He is a Certified/Recommended Stage Combat Instructor/Choreographer (SAFD). Teaching credits include Cinnabar Young Rep, Sonoma County Rep, JR Powers, Salmon Creek Schools, West County Theatre Arts Guild, Drama Studio (Young Actor’s Program) and Occidental Country Charter School.

Janis Dunson Wilson is a published composer (ASCAP), choral and theater conductor, pianist, and organist. She received her undergraduate and master's degrees in composition from the University of Houston, where she studied with Michael Horvit and opera composer Carlisle Floyd.  Janis did her post-master's work in the DMA composition program at the University of Southern California, where she was a teaching fellow and studied with Robert Linn and Morten Lauridsen.
She has been an adjunct in the Theater Department at SRJC since 1999. She teaches musical theater techniques, and recently served as an arranger and vocal coach for the 2007 SRT season at SRJC.  Janis was the musical director for SRJC’s productions of  Cinderella and the rock opera Tommy. She composed the musical  scores for SRJC's productions of  East of the Sun and West of the Moon  and Alice.  In addition to her work at SRJC, Janis teaches and directs in various musical theater venues in Sonoma County, including Alchemia, an innovative day program service in Petaluma for developmentally disabled adults, Cinnabar Opera Theater and Cinnabar Young Rep. The Sonoma County Chamber Singers featured Janis as their composer in residence during the 2006-2007 season.  Janis is also the musical director/organist for St. Teresa's and St. Philip's Catholic Churches in Bodega and Occidental. Her original theatrical compositions include  The Tailor of Gloucester (a family operetta); The Wedding (a full-length opera); and It's a Wonderful Life (a family musical based on the classic Frank Capra film), all commissioned by Cinnabar Opera Theater and Cinnabar Young Rep. Her music direction credits include Santa Rosa Players' productions of  A Christmas Carol, Brigadoon, Holiday Magic,   Anything Goes,  and  My Fair Lady, as well as Actors' Theatre productions of The Bachelors  and  Company in Santa Rosa.