Board of Directors
Developing our company
Zoe Burke
Zoe Burke is an actress, director, intimacy professional, and licensed theatre educator. In her decade working in public school K-12 classrooms, she has centered creating decolonized, accessible, and engaging classical theatre curriculum as well as introducing developmentally appropriate and culturally sensitive consent based practice to empower her students and start their performance careers from a place of agency. Her directing credits range from classics such as Antony & Cleopatra and Cyrano de Bergerac to musicals such as Guys & Dolls and Hairspray to contemporary works such as She Kills Monsters and C*CK. As an intimacy professional, she has worked with companies including ISC Santa Fe, Santa Fe Classic Theater, the Santa Fe Playhouse, &Sons Theatre, Los Alamos Little Theatre, and Tri-M Productions. She is a teaching artist with SAG-AFTRA accredited intimacy professional certification company Intimacy Directors and Coordinators; additionally, she has led workshops on consent based practice and intimacy design for the Upstart Crows, New Mexico School for the Arts, Theatre Santa Fe, Santa Fe Summer Shakespeare, and other New Mexican arts and educational institutions.
Edward Daranyi
President
As an artist Edward has spent 30 years working across Canada and across the globe. He spent 19 seasons with the renowned Stratford Festival of Canada, as an actor, director, teaching artist, and the associate director of education. He continues to work with artists and teachers in El Salvador in partnership with The Stratford Festival and CUSO International. Edward has taught acting at the University of Guelph and the National Theatre School of Canada and has taught Classical Theatre and directed for Humber College, George Brown College, The Centre for Indigenous Theatre, and the National Ballet School of Canada. For Michigan State University, Edward has taught classical theatre and theatre for young audiences and directed The Beaux Stratagem, Cyrano de Bergerac and James and the Giant Peach. His production company, In the Blink, produces youth-oriented theatre in the Toronto area and he regularly voiced characters for the TVO/Treehouse series Mighty Machines. He is proud to be a part of the SFSS and the ISC, and looks forward to working with them in the future.
Caryl Farkas
Secretary • Director of the Upstart Crows & The Shakespeare Gym
Caryl Farkas brings over twenty years of experience with educational outreach and production coordination from Madison, Wisconsin, where she worked with a youth Shakespeare group and the Madison Savoyards. She directed young actors and adults in numerous Shakespeare productions and was a founding board member of Fermat's Last Theater, a Madison company taking an experimental approach with classical theater. She also founded Upstart Crows Productions in Madison for young people wishing to direct their own Shakespeare productions. During her time as president of the Savoyards, she created an advisory board for the company which brought fresh ideas and new support for the group and oversaw their move to a Victorian theater on the UW campus. Caryl’s outreach programs reached numerous schools, libraries, and community centers where she introduced young and old alike to the joys of Shakespeare. She founded Upstart Crows of Santa Fe in 2014.
Vincent Faust
Production Coordinator
Vincent Faust is a professionally trained stage designer, painter and multidisciplinary artist. Over a 50-year career Vince has designed stage sets for more than 160 theatre and dance productions, including several national touring musicals. He is also an accomplished scenic artist, and owned a scenery and display production company. He has designed the sets for recent International Shakespeare Center productions of King Lear, Measure for Measure, King Henry IV – Part 1, Julius Caesar and Coriolanus.
Christopher Frautschi
Treasurer
Christopher has a B.A. in German and Economics as well as an MBA from the University of Chicago. A theatre buff—especially of the Bard—Christopher is a printer and business owner. He has served on many boards and is a supporter of the arts.
Amy Meilander
Amy has a B.A. in Theatre, an M.F.A. in Arts Administration, a B.S. in Computer Science, as well as a Paralegal Certificate. She worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the field of computers for twenty-five years. Amy is now a member of the State Bar of New Mexico Paralegal Division and is currently paralegal for Chief Justice Judith Nakamura of the New Mexico Supreme Court. She has also have been involved with First Friday Club Shakespeare readers since 2004, has taken several Shakespeare Gym workshops, led several series of The Understanders, and twice studied in summer Shakespeare seminars at Oxford University.
Rachel (Martindale) Rippie
Based in Chicago, Illinois, Rachel has dedicated her life to theatre. Growing up in Ohio, she performed in a traveling troupe presenting Shakespeare to area high schools and community productions while interning for The Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Cleveland. She went on to earn her BS in Theatre at Northwestern University, focusing on performance, but studying all aspects of theatre from design to production. Even while completing her studies, she performed in both professional and community productions ranging from Center Stage's Shakespeare in the Park to contemporary and original works by local authors. Rachel served on the board as well as performed for two Off Loop theatre companies in Chicago: The Marquee Theatre Company and Dream Theatre Company. Delving into all areas of production, Rachel adapted, produced, directed, and performed in her own version of A Christmas Carol: An Evening of Dickensian Delights. Currently, Rachel works with police officers all over the state of Illinois in the Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) Program. Additionally, she helps to train medical students to improve their engagement and communication skills at Rush University and Northwestern University’s Standardized Patient programs. Proving that life and art are not only connected, but truly inseparable continues to be her life's work.
Leslie Veditz
Leslie Veditz is a retired U.S. Air Force officer whose career spanned system acquisition, program management, and aircraft maintenance as well as 4 ½ years as an Assistant Professor teaching in the Aeronautical Engineering Department of the United States Air Force Academy. She holds a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan and a M.S in Aeronautical Engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology. Since moving to Santa Fe, she has served on the boards of the Santa Fe Opera Guild and Theatre Lovers Club, served as a math tutor for the Literacy Volunteers of Santa Fe, and as a Docent at the Santa Fe Opera.