Robby Henson (Founder/Artistic Director) is a director of theater and film. He received his M.F.A. from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He has directed five feature films including the Civil War drama Pharoah’s Army with Chris Cooper, Patricia Clarkson and Kris Kristofferson and the Southern crime thriller The Badge with Billy Bob Thornton and Patricia Arquette. He has directed over 40 theater productions and has made five award-winning documentaries shown on PBS including Spalding Gray: A Life in Progress and Trouble Behind, a film about a Southern race riot that was shown at the Sundance Film Festival. He most recently was commissioned to write and direct a science fiction web film, Asparagus, for the Independent Television Service (ITVS) and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting which premiered at this year’s South by Southwest Film Festival.
Elizabeth Orndorff, from Danville, Kentucky, worked in advertising and public relations before turning to fiction and playwriting. Her play Death by Darkness won the International Mystery Writers Festival in 2007 and the Southern Playwrights Competition in 2008. In 2009, her play Aidan’s Gift won the Kentucky Theatre Association’s playwriting award. She recently won a Wurlitzer Foundation Fellowship to live and write plays in Taos, New Mexico.
Curt L. Tofteland (Founder) is the Founder & Producing Director of the internationally acclaimed Shakespeare Behind Bars program. He is a published poet and essayist currently at work on a book written in collaboration with members of SBB/Kentucky program – Behind the Bard-Wire: Reflection, Responsibility, Redemption, & Forgiveness . . . The Transformative Power of Art, Theatre, and Shakespeare. In February 2011, Curt created the newest SBB program at the Earnest C. Brooks Correctional Complex in Muskegon Heights, Michigan. Curt visits college campuses to screen Philomath Films award-winning SBB documentary, conduct audience talk backs, teach master classes, and share lectures.