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Laboratory for Enthusiastic Collaboration Company Bios

AMY B. DAVIS (Technical Director, Resident Designer) Originally from Oregon, Amy B. Davis moved to New England to attend the Univerity of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she received her MFA in Scenic Design. As a member of IATSE Local 488 and United Scenic Artists 829, she has worked as a scenic artist, sculptor and prop builder for theatre, opera, television and movie sets. Amy now lives in Easthampton, MA where, with her daughter Ava and her partner Andrew Stuart, she owns New City Scenic & Display, Inc., a full service design and fabrication facility.

AARON KAHN (Co-Artistic Director, Founder) is a Hong Kong-based multi-disciplinary performing artist and teacher. He founded the Laboratory for Enthusiastic Collaboration (LEC) in 1996 and has since directed more than a dozen productions in the U.S., Canada, Thailand, Israel, India and France. Recent work include a dance theatre collaboration with Alexx Shilling in ABSENCE: a history that performed in Los Angeles in 2013 and an Apple ad spoof called My New Mac Pro that has had over 200,000 views on YouTube. Performance highlights include work with The Bread and Puppet and The Living Theatres as well as workshops with Joseph Chaikin, Goat Island Performance and Peter Brook. He is a founding member of Namaste Theatre Company and an affiliated artist with the International Theatre Institute (ITI/UNESCO). Aaron holds a BAIS in Theatre Directing from Marlboro College and SIT. He completed his professional training at École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris where he lived and worked from 2007-2012. He is currently producing podcasts as a revival of his 1993 KSCR-FM radio show. His most recent work can be found on soundcloud.com under radio KAHNtents.

IRA S. MURFIN is a Chicago-based writer, theatre artist and scholar. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre & Drama at Northwestern University. His dissertation examines talk-based performances in the post-1960s American avant-garde. Critical and creative writing has appeared in elimae, Fiction at Work, Chicago Art Criticism, Theatre Topics, Theatre Journal, Theatre Research International, 491, Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Requited, where he is also the Performance Editor. He is currently a Chicago Shakespeare Theater PreAmble Scholar and a Graduate Affiliate of the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. His solo and collaborative performance work has been seen at Rhinofest, MCA Chicago, Links Hall, and the Chicago Cultural Center, among other places. In addition to the Laboratory for Enthusiastic Collaboration., he is also a member of a second theatrical laboratory, The Laboratory for the Development of Substitute Materials, which makes performances about cities and science.

JONATHAN TAYLOR (Graphic Designer, Web Master) teaches photography, graphic design, and visual art in a wide-variety contexts from a magnet high school arts program, to the Frog Hollow Vermont State Craft Center, to Green Mountain College and Castleton State College. In 2005 he was selected as a University of Vermont Teacher of the Year. He has been a working graphic designer since 1993, and a photographer and visual artist since 1995. He holds a BA in Visual Art and Literature from Marlboro College and is currently working on getting his Studio Art MFA from MICA. He has designed all of the graphic work for the LEC since An Experiment Goes Public in 1996.

BARBARA WHITNEY (Artistic Associate) is a performer, puppeteer, director and dramaturg who has worked with such notable directors as Anne Bogart, Robert Woodruff, Dominique Serrand, and Marcus Stern at the A.R.T. From 1997-2002 she toured internationally with Sandglass Theater and has performed with Blair Thomas & Company since 2005. She is Co-Artistic Director of Company of Strangers, a multi-arts performance ensemble. She currently works as a production stage manager for Grammy award winning new music ensemble Eighth Blackbird.

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