Rita Giomi (Director)

Rita has over 35 years of experience in professional theatre locally and across the country. Recent SCT credits include The Lamp is the Moon, Into the West, Brooklyn Bridge, The Garden of Rikki Tikki Tavi, Pippi Longstocking, and Crash. She has been directing at SCT steadily since 1981, so the full list is long and varied, and includes: A Year with Frog and Toad, Harold and the Purple Crayon, The Borrowers, Getting Near to Baby, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, I Was a Rat!, A Tale of Two Cities, and Hamlet. Other Seattle-area credits include work with Seattle Shakespeare Company, Seattle Public Theatre, Seattle Rep, ACT, The Empty Space, Village Theatre, TAG, Theater Schmeater, Center Stage, Unexpected Productions, and Stark/Raving Theatre. Ms. Giomi is the Artistic Associate at SCT, and from 1993 to 2007, she served as the Artistic Director of SCT’s Young Actor Institute.

Ramón Esquivel (Playwright)

Ramón is a playwright and educator born and raised in the Seattle area. His plays Luna, Nasty, and Nocturnal are published through Dramatic Publishing, and are included in two recent anthologies, New Visions/New Voices: 25 Years/25 Plays, and Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences. His play, The Shahrazad Society, won the Aurand Harris Memorial Playwriting Award from New England Theatre Conference. He is developing The Hero Twins: Blood Race at Appalachian Young People’s Theatre (NC) and Childsplay Theatre (AZ). Ramón's first play, Dulce, was featured at the 2018 Austin Latino New Play Festival at Teatro Vivo. Ramón has taught English, history, drama, and creative writing in Washington DC, Brooklyn, Vancouver BC, and Seattle, and currently teaches playwriting and theatre education at Central Washington University.

Courtney Sale (Director/Artistic Director) Courtney Sale currently serves as the Artistic Director of Seattle Children's Theatre where she has directed The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane and The Little Prince. Commissioned writers under her tenure at SCT include Idris Goodwin, Cheryl West, Allison Gregory, Karen Hartman, Trista Baldwin, Ramon Esquivel, and James Still. Recent directing projects:  Tiny Beautiful Things at Seattle Rep,  Steven Dietz’s The Ghost of Splinter Cove at Children’s Theatre of Charlotte and Support Group for Men at Contemporary American Theatre Festival. Prior to SCT, she spent three years as Associate Artistic Director at Indiana Repertory Theatre, where directing credits include the world premiere of April 4, 1968:  Before We Forgot How to Dream, The Mountaintop, The Mousetrap, Jackie & Me, And Then They Came For Me, The Giver, and two iterations of A Christmas Carol. Other credits include The Cake, Wild Horses, Not Medea (CATF), Mr. Burns, A Post Electric Play, On Clover Road (The Phoenix Theater), Twelfth Night and The Tempest (Indy Shakes), and Zen Prayers & Songs (Fusebox), written and performed by Kirk Lynn. With the Duplicates, she has co-created The Fictional Life of Historical Oddities, September Play, The Man with the Dancing Eyes, and The Poison Squad (Austin Critics Award). She has developed new work at New Plays for Young Audiences at NYU/Provincetown Playhouse, Denver Center Theatre Company’s Summit New Play Festival, The New Harmony Project, Write Now, and The Orchard Project. Other awards included Indianapolis Business Journal’s Forty Under Forty Designation. She has taught at Summer at Cornish, Seattle Children’s Museum, Temple College, and the University of Texas at Austin. Ms. Sale is a proud member of the National Theatre Conference and represented by Abrams Artists NYC.  BFA, Cornish College of the Arts. MFA, The University of Texas at Austin.

Madison Silva (Stage Manager)

Madison is a freelance stage/production manager in the Seattle area. Previous credits include Above Between Below at Seattle Children’s Theatre; Lady Windermere’s Fan at Taproot Theatre; Imaginary Opus at eSe Teatro; Inside Out and Back Again at Book-It Repertory Theatre, and Peerless at ArtsWest. Her worked is focused on equity, diversity, and inclusion.

Elizabeth Stasio (Production Assistant)

Liz is a local stage manager, born and raised in the Seattle area who grew up coming to see shows at SCT. Above Between Below is her second show with the company, after last season's The Lamp Is The Moon. Other stage management and backstage credits include work with West of Lenin, Sound Theatre Company, Annex Theatre, Fantastic.Z Theatre Company, Book-It Repertory Theatre, and Taproot Theatre, among others.

Shawn Ketchum Johnson (Scenic Designer) Shawn is a Seattle-based theater maker. His expertise in site-specific and devised performance keep him linked to innovative socially-engaged ensembles throughout the country. Recent local projects include the workshop premiere of Time to Tell, an original hybrid performance piece presented at Lee Center for the Arts. Recent local scenic designs include the world premiere of Daisy at ACT (Gregory Award Winner); Ghosts at ArtsWest (Gregory nominated); and Upstart Crow’s Bring Down the House, and Richard III at Seattle Shakespeare Company. An alumnus of Northwestern University, Johnson holds the Scenic Design faculty position at Seattle University.

Melanie Taylor Burgess (Costume Designer)

Melanie’s work as a Costume Designer is based in Seattle, but occasionally, she is taken elsewhere: The Guthrie, Cincinnati Playhouse, Idaho Theatre for Youth, Honolulu Theatre for Youth, Hawaii Opera, and Ohio’s Tantrum Theatre, but the largest portion of her work is generated here in the Seattle area.  She has designed over 160 productions for Seattle Rep, 5^th Avenue Theatre, ACT, Intiman Theatre, The Village Theatre, Seattle Opera, Seattle Children’s Theatre, Seattle Shakespeare Company, NCTC, Seattle Theatre Company, Strawberry Theatre Workshop, ArtsWest, Taproot Theatre and sadly, a few theatres that don’t exist anymore. She is also honored to be on the faculty for Cornish College of The Arts.

Chris R. Walker (Sound Designer/Composer)

Mr. Walker is very happy to be in his 18^th year of designing sound for SCT. In Seattle, he has designed at Seattle Repertory Theatre, ACT.,Intiman, and The 5^th Avenue.  In California, he’s designed at The Old Globe Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, the Mark Taper Forum, the Geffen Playhouse, and ACT (San Francisco).  He spent seven seasons as the resident designer at the American Repertory Theatre in Boston, designing over forty productions while there.  He has also designed in New York, Houston, Philadelphia, Princeton, Chicago, Washingon D.C,. and Phoenix, as well as internationally in Singapore, Taiwan, and Moscow.  Commercially, he has designed for Intel, Harvard University, Starbucks, and Popcap Games.  He holds a degree in Classical Piano performance from Cornish College of the Arts.

Geoffry Alm (Fight Choreographer) His long association with SCT began in 1981, and continues with the story of this remarkable man. His work has been seen locally at Seattle Rep, Seattle Opera, 5th Avenue, among others, and nationally at The Globe, Arizona Theatre Co., Shakespeare Santa Cruz, and SCT’s production of Robin Hood in NYC. He is a teacher of Stage Fighting at Cornish College of the Arts, UW PATP, and Freehold Theatre/Lab, and a Fight Master with the Society of American Fight Directors.