Ricardo Khan (Directing/New Project Development) is the Co-founder and Artistic Director of the Crossroads Theatre Company of New Brunswick, NJ. Under his direction, Crossroads won the 1999 Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theater, making it one of the nation’s most acclaimed African-American theater companies in history. He is also the Founder and Director of a new multi-national writers’ initiative called The World Theatre Lab, currently based at theatres in New York, Johannesburg and London.  He has directed in New York at the Manhattan Theatre Club, the Negro Ensemble Company, Queens Theatre in the Park, the Village Gate and the world famous Apollo Theatre; at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, Crossroads, and in South Africa at the Windybrow Theatre. His work has recently been represented on Broadway in Hot Feet! for which he was Associate Director. He is a recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from Rutgers University (1997). In 1989, he was co-chair of the National Endowment for the Arts’ theater advisory panel and from 1996-2000 was the President of Theatre Communications Group, the national organization of American professional theatres. During Crossroads’ first 20 years, Khan nurtured new plays that have forever enriched the cannon of the American theatre, working with Ntozake Shange, Ron Milner, Leslie Lee, Rita Dove, George C. Wolfe, August Wilson, Anna Deavere Smith, Mbongeni Ngema, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee among the many.

Barry Kyle (Professor of Theatre Arts) is an Honorary Associate Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and Founding Artistic Director of Swine Palace Productions in Louisiana. He was the first Artistic Director of  the RSC's Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. Mr. Kyle has directed more than 30 productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company. These include Love's Labour's Lost, Measure for Measure, The Two Noble Kinsmen, The Taming of the Shrew, Richard II, Edward Bond's Lear, and Marlowe's Dr. Faustus. His work has been seen in London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Jerusalem, Moscow, Warsaw, Melbourne, Singapore and many other places around the world. He has been twice nominated for Olivier Awards as Best Director for his RSC productions of Shakespeare's comedies in London. In New York he directed an off-Broadway production of Henry V which was awarded the Lucille Lortel Award for Best Revival. He also directed To Kill a Mockingbird at Actor's Theatre of Louisville and Romeo and Juliet at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C. Also in New York City, he adapted and directed Henry VI, which won a Drama Desk Nomination as Outstanding Revival. He has directed many major British actors including Helen Mirren, Jeremy Irons, Patrick Stewart, Kenneth Branagh and Ben Kingsley. He was the first Western director to work at the National Theatre in Prague where he directed Shakespeare's King Lear during the 'velvet revolution'. Mr Kyle later directed a ground-breaking all-female production of Richard III at Shakespeare's Globe in London, where he had also directed a second production of King Lear, which went on to play in Tokyo, Japan.  In 2006, he directed The Mysteries- a modern version of the medieval Christian drama, set in the bombed-out cathedral in Coventry, for the Belgrade Theatre in England. The Guardian newspaper in the UK ranked the production as one of that year's 5 star productions in England, and he was awarded "Director of the Year" by Britain's Daily Mail newspaper in 2006.  He completed a major revival of An Inspector Calls by J.B. Priestley for Clwyd Theatr Cymru, the national theatre of Wales, where he is now directing his own adaptation of Nikolai Erdman's The Suicide. In 2007, Mr. Kyle directed Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream in a big budget production in Singapore on a hillside site, with an international Asian cast, and in which the set covered five acres.  Later this year he will direct the English and Welsh premiere of The Drawer Boy and prepare the World premier production of The Master and Margarita, adapted by Ron Hutchinson, which will begin its life at UMKC.

Stephanie Roberts (Assistant Professor of Physical Theatre) teaches Morning Practice, Commedia dell’Arte, Clown, Mask, and Epic Storytelling for the MFA Professional Actor Training Program. She has toured nationally and abroad with companies such as Annex, Tears of Joy, Living Voices and Seattle Mime Theatre. She has also taught and directed devised work for the Seattle Repertory Theatre as well Cornish College of the Arts. Ensemble-generated works include Meanwhile (UMKC’s Undergraduate Theatre Department), The Best Story Never Told (Dell'Arte International and CalArts), and Boom! An International Lost and Found Marching Band (KC Fringe Festival, and The St. Mane in Lanesboro, MN). Professor Roberts was recently award an ArtsKC Inspiration Grant to develop a one-woman mask play, and was chosen by the Charlotte St. Foundation for a one-year studio residency as part of the Urban Culture Project. She holds a BFA in Acting from Cornish, and an MFA in Ensemble Based Physical Theatre from Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre.