Janet Feder (she/her)
A native of Boulder, Colorado Janet Feder is most widely known for pioneering composition for prepared guitar. Free from genre, her music both acknowledges and is simultaneously unmoored from the trappings of jazz, classical, avant-garde, folk or pop, creating a new musical lexicon and aesthetic ideal alike. She has been featured widely in print media and on numerous recordings, radio programs, and film scores including internationally acclaimed solo albums, compilations, and National Public Radio’s Tiny Desk Concert.
Janet is a lecturer at the University of Colorado. Touring and teaching internationally, she has performed and collaborated with a diverse landscape of renowned musicians. She is also one-half of the performing and recording duo cowhause. Janet collaboratively conceived of and co-curated the international new media festival MediaLive (2011-17) and is a longtime artistic associate of Square Product Theatre. She serves the boards of non-profits Creative Music Works and Supporters of Children. In her spare time Janet is an avid cyclist.
Madalyne Heiken (she/her):
Madalyne (Maddie) Heiken is an educator and life-long learner. They have directed several plays and musicals for youth theatre including Little Shop of Horrors, The Westing Game, She Kills Monsters, and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. They have assistant directed under various Denver directors on plays such as Stop Kiss, The Lonesome West, and The Laramie Project. Maddie has stage managed one-acts/short plays for the University of Denver, Denver Fringe, and Two Cent Lion. Maddie is the most excited when she gets to produce and direct projects created or written by her friends which includes SOAK by Connor Rodenbeck.
In their free time, Maddie is reading books on pedagogy, justice, and (of course) education. She wholeheartedly believes in the power of education in disrupting the school-to-prison pipeline. Previously, she served as the evaluations associate for Mirror Image Arts to help disrupt this pipeline through participatory theatre. In 2022, Maddie worked with the MIA team to pass a statewide bill to advance youth justice initiatives. She continues to support such initiatives in her free time. Maddie’s love for art, justice, and connection combine in the work she does with Action Change Theatre (ACT Ensemble) and Grapefruit Lab. She’s fortunate to collaborate with brilliant artists inside Colorado prisons and to witness the communities they build.
Julie Rada (she/they - Program Lead):
Julie Rada is a theatre and performance maker, educator, and scholar. She has done live art and theatre for 34 years and has worked on over 80 performance projects, with a focus on original work, site-specific compositions, and new plays. As a performer and researcher, she has toured nationally and internationally. Primarily a director, Julie has directed over 20 full-scale theatrical productions. She has performed various featured roles in many other performance, film, and video projects. Her work has been reviewed in Backstage, The Denver Post, The Arizona Republic, The Rocky Mountain News, Westword, The New Times, and others. She served as artist-in-residence at the Rio Mesa Center where she developed The In-Between and traveled through the Balkans on a nationally competitive Theatre Communications Group “Global Connections” grant, producing a solo performance in a former brick factory in Belgrade entitled From Mud to Stars.
Julie has worked in the prison system for over twelve years, founding programs in three states (Arizona, Utah, and Colorado), working on two productions on Mississippi’s death row, and facilitating new works of theatre with incarcerated artists at 12+ facilities. She was selected as an artist-in-residence by the National Endowment for the Arts at the Phoenix Federal Corrections Institution. She worked for two years as Lead Affiliate Faculty and Director of Programming for the University of Denver Prison Arts Initiative, founding many of the practices the program is known for and training dozens of facilitators of all disciplines. Julie’s prison arts scholarship includes chapters in Prison Pedagogies: Learning and Teaching with Imprisoned Writers and Into Abolition Theatre and a peer-reviewed article in ArtsPraxis. She has created performances with refugees, people with disabilities, youth experiencing homelessness, professional actors, and people dying in hospice. In addition to her creative work, teaching, and scholarship, she is also working in advocacy with Mirror Image Arts, advancing statewide youth justice initiatives during the 2022 legislative session.
Currently, Julie is Chair of Visual & Performing Arts at Community College of Aurora and they have served on faculty at the University of Utah, Metro State University, and Naropa University. She holds an MFA from Arizona State University and a certificate in Restorative Justice Leadership and Facilitation from the University of San Diego. Julie is co-founder of a Denver-based queer multimedia performance collective exploring community-embedded art and performance called Grapefruit Lab.
Lauren Schaad (she/her)
Classically trained, she earned her BA in Theater from Colby College in the wilds of Maine. Lauren is a gifted improviser and has studied with ImprovBoston, Second City and is currently a main stage cast member with Denver’s Chaos Bloom Theater.
Lauren is an acting and improv coach within the Denver community and beyond. She has crafted and led bespoke workshops for large organizations including BMW Group, Patagonia, as well as for nimble startups and nonprofits like Special Olympics Colorado.
A firm believer that the arts should be accessible to all, Lauren has special expertise in empowering women, individuals with disabilities, and incarcerated people through the dramatic arts. As a facilitator with Action Change Theatre (ACT) Ensemble, she and participants explore the meaning of performance in prison at Limon Correctional and Denver Women’s Correctional Facilities - her most rewarding work to date. Lauren has studied trauma-informed expressive arts with Cathy Malchiodi, PhD, as a means of supporting a wide range of lived experiences.
Galen Trine-McMahan (he/him)
Galen has a lifelong passion for helping people get in touch with, and powerfully express, their stories. He served as a trial lawyer, investigator, and consultant for a decade on human rights cases, and also trained as a film and stage actor in Los Angeles and Australia for 4 years. His legal cases were featured in an Academy Award nominated documentary, and he works primarily on behalf of mothers and families after extreme violence. He works as a mediator and restorative justice consultant. He enjoys cooking, gardening, reading, playing music on guitar and piano, and film-making.
Alison Turner (she/her)
Alison Turner grew up in the mountains of Colorado, where she learned to endure large amounts of time in inclement weather waiting for buses. After completing degrees at CU Boulder, the University of Alberta, Bennington College, and the University of Denver (comparative literature, comparative literature again, creative writing, and literary studies), she has confirmed that, yep, she loves reading and writing. Her work has found readers (she hopes) in the journals Western American Literature, Archivaria, American Archivist, and Community Literacy Journal, among others. In 2023, her first collection of short stories was published with Torrey House Press.
Alison also digs community literacy and community writing. She has collaborated with colleagues, staff, and residents/guests in shelters throughout Denver to co-publish a podcast, two zines, and an oral history project to celebrate and record the knowledge and creativity of people experiencing homelessness. Until recently, she was a 2022-2024 ACLS Leading Edge Postdoctoral Fellow with Operation Shoestring in Jackson, Mississippi.