the
company
our origin story
in 2023, erica started offering free, weekly drop-in training sessions at westbeth artists housing for actors who had previously studied Grotowski-based work with her. in a post-covid time, it felt essential to commune, to be in physical practice, to refuel. yet over time, as our interests in the work moved from pure training to performance ideas, we realized we were in a process of organically becoming a company. while we’ve been in this work for decades individually, as the already, we are just beginning. and we can’t wait to share our work with you.
Celeste Arias
Theater credits include Anatomy of a Suicide (Atlantic Theater Company), A Midsummer Night's Dream (Old Globe), Superstitions (New Ohio/Pool Plays), Uncle Vanya (Old Globe/Hunter Theater Project), The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls (Yale Rep), The Three Seagulls or MASHAMASHAMASHA! (HERE Arts Center/TRE). Films include The Post (Dir. Steven Spielberg), The Big Sick, Rebel in the Rye and Kate Can’t Swim. On TV she’s recurred on Paper Girls (Amazon) and NOS4A2 (AMC), as well as guest starred on Evil, The Code, Bull and The Good Wife (CBS). Celeste is a proud member of The Actor’s Center and a graduate of New York University and Yale School of Drama.
Francesca Fernandez
Actor and theatre producer from the SF Bay Area, now based in New York City. Off-Broadway: Smart (Ensemble Studio Theatre), Jonah (Roundabout Theatre Company), ...what the end will be (Roundabout Theatre Company), Sex & the Abbey (The Brick), Marilla of Green Gables (Royal Family Productions), House of Telescopes (Pipeline Theatre Co.), Gloria: A Life (Daryl Roth Theatre), Kenny's Tavern (59E59), Love: Medea (Center at Park West). Regional: The Heart Sellers (Studio Theatre), Bald Sisters (Steppenwolf Theatre Company), Exotic Deadly: Or the MSG Play (SF Playhouse), Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson - Apt 4B (Dorset Theatre Festival), Twelfth Night (Kansas City Rep), Good Person of Szechwan (CalShakes), Lily's Revenge (Southern Rep), Sheddin' (Horizon Theatre), Hotel Plays (Provincetown Players), Romeo & Juliet (NOLA Project), Midsummer Night's Dream (NOLA Shakespeare Festival), Numb (Goat in the Road Productions), and more. TV/Film: Thumb, Law & Order: SVU, Blue Bloods, PBS’ Great Performances of Gloria: A Life, The Hardest Part, Locker Room Series. You can hear her as Cordelia in King Lear, and Emilia in Othello at Play On! Podcasts. Yale MFA Acting @chesfernandez francescafm.com
JJ McGlone is a playwright and actor based in Brooklyn. His play, Burn Book —which he also starred in— opened in the Fall of 2025. The production was directed by OBIE winner Rory Pelsue. His film credits include, A Different Man and Human Theories. He's participated in readings and workshops with Williamstown Theatre Festival, Fake Friends, Ars Nova, Page 73, The Playwrights Realm, and The Hearth. He holds a BFA from DePaul University and an MFA from Yale School of Drama. He also trained at BADA.
Nora Woolley
As an actress, Nora has collaborated with theater makers including Paul Bargetto, PD Michnewicz, Collective: Unconscious, Raquel Cion, Kim Katzberg, Erica Fae, and, formatively, in early career with directors Karin Coonrod and Kate Whoriskey. She toured extensively with the Drama Desk Award-winning, Charlie Victor Romeo and co-starred in the widely-acclaimed film version of the same play (Sundance FF, Netflix release). Other film includes, Simple Somewhere Else (dir Amatus-sami Karim), The Transfiguration (dir Michael O'Shea, Festival de Cannes), and Chase Me (dir Annie Silverstein). As writer, her episodic series optioned and developed by HBO (Exec Prod Mahershala Ali, Mimi Valdés, Amatus-sami Karim); original theater work presented by PS 122, IRT, BAX, and Catch Series, among others. She is an original member of the early 2000s performance art band Force Theory. NYIT Award for Best Short Play; Washington DC Audience Award for Best Actress. Nora teaches in the Drama Departments at Pace, The New School, and NYU/Tisch.
Ino Badanjak is a Greek-Croatian actor and theater-maker born and raised in Athens, Greece. She recently graduated with an MFA in Drama from The Juilliard School, where she received the 2023 Princess Grace Award. BA in Theater Studies from Emerson College.
Ino’s artistic practice lives at the intersection of embodiment, improvisation, and storytelling. Her discovery of Action Theater, created by Ruth Zaporah, shaped her approach to performance—emphasizing spontaneity, presence, and the body as a site of imagination. Grotowski-inspired work followed naturally, aligning with her belief that the actor’s craft begins and ends in the body, where movement, breath, and impulse reveal the hidden landscapes of the self. Drawn to process-based creation, she views performance as a living inquiry—an act of listening to what the body remembers before the mind defines.
On screen, Ino appears in Pretty Little Liars: Summer School (HBO Max), Law & Order: SVU (NBC), The Assassins (Prime UK), and The Pitt (HBO Max). Theater credits include Queens (Manhattan Theatre Club), Romeo & Juliet (Shakespeare in the Sound), and Phaedra’s Love (Lenfest Center for the Arts).
Leland Fowler
Off-Broadway: Burn Book; The Tune Up (Lincoln Center & Little Island); Sally & Tom, Plays for the Plague Year, Henry V, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (The Public); This Land Was Made (Vineyard); one in two (The New Group); Novenas for a Lost Hospital (Rattlestick); If Pretty Hurts, Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka (Playwrights Horizons); Measure for Measure (TFANA). Leland has also performed at Williamstown, Dorset Theatre Festival, St. Louis Shakespeare Festival, Westport Country Playhouse, McCarter Theatre Center, Yale Rep, and Alliance Theatre. TV/Film: "Blossoming Wasp;" “City on a Hill.” BA: Morehouse College; MFA: Yale School of Drama. Leland is a member of the Actor’s Center.
Hudson Oz is an actor and filmmaker. Recent tv and film credits include Monster: The Ed Gein Story, Joker: Folie a Deux, and American Horror Stories. NYU Tisch BFA Acting/Film ‘16, Yale Drama MFA Acting ‘19.
Ato Blankson-Wood is a multidisciplinary performance artist and theater maker. As a writer/composer Ato is developing original works with the support of The Team’s Petri Projects and Berkeley Rep’s Ground Floor Residency. As an actor, Ato most recently starred in the world premiere of Jeremy O. Harris’ Spirit of the People and Camino Real at The Williamstown Theatre Festival after starring in the off-Broadway premiere of Wole Soyinka’s The Swamp Dwellers at TFANA. Prior to this, he played Clifford Bradshaw in Cabaret on Broadway. He is best known for his starring role in Harris’ critically acclaimed Slave Play, for which he was nominated for a 2021 Tony Award. He also earned nominations for the Drama League Awards for playing ‘Gary,’ a role he originated for the New York Theatre Workshop production, where his performance earned him a Lortel Nomination. Ato played the titular role of Hamlet in Shakespeare in the Park’s production directed by Kenny Leon. Ato also starred opposite Bill Camp and Elizabeth Marvel in Long Day’s Journey Into Night for Audible, which reunited him with Slave Play director Robert O’Hara. Ato had his breakout performance in the Public Theatre musical The Total Bent (Drama League and Lucille Lortel Award nomination) Ato has also been seen on Broadway in Hair and Lysistrata Jones. Films include Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit, Spike Lee’s BlacKKKlansman, Worth, opposite Michael Keaton, and Peter Hedge’s The Same Storm. Television includes “The Good Fight,” “She’s Gotta Have It,” and Ava DuVernay’s “When They See Us.” Ato is a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and the Yale School of Drama.
Zoe Mann (she/her) is an actor based in NYC. Some of her theatre credits include Mother Play at Studio Theatre directed by Margot Bordelon, Other People’s Dead Dad’s at Dixon Place directed by Rory Pelsue, A Doll’s House Part 3 at Ars Nova directed by Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley, Girls at Yale Repertory Theatre directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, and The Figaro Plays at The McCarter Theatre directed by Stephen Wadsworth. She can also be seen in episodes of Elsbeth (CBS), New Amsterdam (NBC), Chicago Med (NBC), Wu-Tang: An American Saga (Hulu), The Good Fight (Paramount Plus), and The Chair (Netflix). She holds her MFA in acting from The Yale School of Drama. On social media: @zoe__mann
Courtney Renee Stallings is an actor, writer, teaching artist, film and theatre maker, living in NY. Co-founder of CutAbove Production Studios. Recent TV credits: Your Friends and Neighbors (Apple) Law and Order (NBC). BFA, Performig Arts and Social Justice, USF. MFA, Acting, New School For Drama. courtneyreneestallings.com
Erica Fae is a theatre-maker, filmmaker, actor and teacher. Her first feature, To Keep the Light, was awarded the FIPRESCI Prize (International Critics’ Prize/Mannheim), Best Director (Berlin Indp FF), Best of Show (BendFilm), Best Emerging Director (St. Louis Int’l FF), 2 Best Narrative Feature Awards (Ojai and Port Townsend festivals), and 2 Best Cinematography Awards (Woods Hole & Las Vegas festivals). It also screened at numerous other festivals, and was picked up by Gravitas in US/Canada and Flix Premiere in UK/France, and is available on Amazon Prime. Her play, Take What Is Yours, was named a Critics’ Pick in The New York Times and Backstage, and other original works for theatre have been supported by HERE Arts, NYTW, The New OHIO, 59E59, New Georges, IRT, DTW, The Culture Project, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts with funding, workshops and/or residencies. As an actor, she's worked with Martha Clarke on 3 productions, has had recurring roles on HBO, has worked with scads of downtown theatre artists, and has appeared in numerous features. Erica has been on the acting faculty at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale for 16 years, and has also taught at NYU’s Experimental Theatre Wing, the Actors Center, The Film Academy Baden-Württemberg (Germany), Columbia's Film School, and the New School for Drama. She's written for Filmmaker Magazine, is writing a chapter for an upcoming book Grotowski-based training, and was one of the founders of the assembly - a biennial conference in Grotowski-based training. Erica was also a speaker on a Sundance panel on filmmaking and social change, and is in development on her second feature, The Utopians.
Julian Elijah Martinez
Broadway: Network. Off-Broadway: This Land Was Made (Vineyard Theatre); Sanctuary City (New York Theater Workshop); Anatomy of A Suicide (Atlantic Theater Company); King Lear (Compagnia de Colombari); and Alligator (New Georges). Regional: King Lear (Shakespeare Theater Company); The Salvagers (Yale Rep) Father Comes Home From The Wars Part 1, 2, 3 (co-production Yale Rep and A.C.T); and 9 Circles (Forum Theatre, Helen Hayes nomination). TV: Wu-tang: An American Saga; Law and Order: SVU; Prodigal Son; and Elementary. Other: Company member of The Acting Company, Founding member of The Visit, and the Already and board member of Developing Artist. Training: MFA Yale School Of Drama. julianelijahmartinez.com
Mitchell Winter
Theater credits include: Hamlet (dir. Kenny Leon, Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park), Wolf Play (dir. Dustin Wills, MCC & Soho Rep)(Lortel Award for Best Ensemble), Last Call (the Pack Company, En Garde Arts), Dracula and The Importance of Being Earnest (dir. David Auburn, Berkshire Theatre Group), Frontieres Sans Frontieres (Bushwick Starr), Redemption Story (ART/NY), A Winter’s Tale, A Doctor In Spite of Himself, American Night (Yale Rep), Sleep No More (Punchdrunk), Miss Saigon (Australian National Tour), Thoroughly Modern Millie (The Production Company), Normativity (NYMF), Die Fledermaus (Australian Opera Studio) and Joseph… Dreamcoat (Really Useful). Film/TV credits include: Mr. Robot (USA Network), Oh Jerome No (FX), If Not Love (official Sundance selection). MFA: Yale School of Drama. He is the recipient of 2023 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Ensemble for Wolf Play. @mitchellwinter