Christina McCarthy is a multi media artist and Lecturer in the UC Santa Barbara Theater and Dance Department. She performed professionally as a dancer in New York City with Nina Wiener and with Santa Barbara Dance Theater. She has taught dance and visual arts for over thirty years to students who range in age from preschool to pre professional college students. For the last ten years she has been involved in choreographing and teaching dance at Santa Barbara High School. She has taught ceramics, mask making, puppet making, drawing and painting in for elementary and middle school students in the Santa Barbara area. She has a passion for leading students to discover their own voice and style as they create their works. She is a deeply committed teacher of dance at UC Santa Barbara and is most interested in the students moving beyond the technique and into their artistry as performers. Ms. McCarthy has choreographed over twenty full-length musicals and over thirty concert dance works. She has created puppets and masks for over thirty productions, both large scale, a fully animated Humpty Dumpty egg costume, and small scale, multiple rod style puppets for “Once Upon a Mattress”. Many of her dance works utilize her visual arts skills and involve the use of puppets and masks.
odyssey team members
Assistant Professor of Theatre at the University of California, Santa BarbaraM.F.A., Scenic and Lighting Design from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Greg is a working theatrical lighting and scenic designer for theatre, opera, music, dance, and television. Next year he will be designing a site specific opera project in Kathmandu, Nepal.Recent projects include lighting design for the premiere of Clinton for the New York Musical Festival at the Signature theatre center, costume design for Tannhauser at Albania’s National Theatre of Opera and Ballet, and Chicago for Perseverance Theatre in Juneau, Alaska. Greg has designed Off Broadway productions for Classic Stage Company, The Classical Theatre of Harlem, 37 Arts, and Baruch Performing Arts Center. In New York and regionally, he has worked at Lincoln Center, The Kennedy Center, Santa Rosa’s Summer Rep, Sierra Repertory Theatre in California, Montana’s Alpine Theatre Project, Tennessee’s Playhouse on the Square, Maine’s Penobscot Theatre Company, Washington’s Capital Playhouse, and DC’s Washington Shakespeare Company, among others. For television, Greg has art directed for VH1, MTV, CNBC, Fuse Network, and ESPN. He has has taught or acted as a guest artist at Juilliard, Fort Lewis College, The University of Maine, Catholic University, Whitman College, and CUNY LaGuardia. Greg is a 2015 Hellman Foundation Faculty Fellow and has been nominated for the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Design.
Michael Morgan teaches voice and speech in the Department of Theater and Dance. He spearheads this project. The project’s significance connects with his origins growing up in Harlem where he came to understand the survival choices that dominate the youth in tough neighborhoods. He has discovered that facilitating students to go on and believe in their potential and shift their lives from destructive to productive has been his highest calling as a teacher. He intends to put his experience to work in service of marginalized members of the community. Michael has taught at Penn State, Yale School of Drama, Temple University, Walnut Street Theater, Theatre Conservatorium in Brussels, Royal Conservatoire in Liege, Arena Stage, Neighborhood Playhouse, University of Hawaii, American Academy of Dramatic Art, UCSD, Pepperdine University, and Cal Arts. He has directed at the Maine Shakespeare Festival and for Mango Productions in Santa Barbara. As an actor, he has performed at the Mark Taper Forum, Yale Rep, La Mama, California Shakespeare Festival, Ensemble Theatre New York, Independent Shakespeare Company, La Jolla Playhouse, Shakespeare and Company, Peoples Light and Theatre Company, The Red Pear Theatre in the South of France, City Street Theater, The Negro Ensemble Company, Shakespeare Santa Cruz, Lobero Theatre, Center Stage in Santa Barbara, Classical Theater Lab in Los Angeles, Sierra Repertory Theater, and The Working Theater in New York. Utilizing mythic blueprints as a catalyst for exploring current social issues has been an enduring aesthetic interest. Creating New Classics based in the co-opting of dominant culture stories by sub-culture voices has been part of his genesis since he began acting in political street theater. The Odyssey Project fulfills the mission of maintaining high aesthetic standards in synthesis with social justice.