Theater Alumni

Upon graduation from Oberlin, she landed the Disneyland Costuming Professional Internship, and continued at Disney for 8 years, first as Disneyland Entertainment Fabric Designer, then as Costume Designer. She designed for Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge, Avengers Campus, and many parades and shows at the national and international Disney Parks. She left Disney in 2021 to pursue independent work and is now an independent costume designer and illustrator/artist.  She has designed for films, webseries, and a great variety of theatrical productions.  She has also built back in her love of performing to her multi-disciplinary career, and frequently works as an immersive theatre actor and singer/performer at live events in Los Angeles. 

Her film work includes The Surrogate, Luce, Thine Ears Shall Bleed (upcoming), and Lost Nation (writer/director; Best NH Short, 2023 New Hampshire Film Festival). She has been nominated for Lortel and Drama Desk awards for her stage performances and created the character of 'Suze' in Jacke Sibblies Drury's 2019 Pulitizer Prize-winning play, Fairview. With a career mainly focused on new plays, she has premiered work by Sarah Ruhl, Will Eno, Jaclyn Backhaus, David Adjmi, Jen Silverman, and Rinne Groff, among others. Most recently, she appeared in Your Own Personal Exegesis at Lincoln Center. She received her MFA from the Tisch Graduate Acting Program, NYU. 

Elana participated in the Kennedy Center Playwriting Initiative in 2021. She is the founding member of EMG Playwriting Workshop and Ghost Light Dramatists, and holds memberships with the Dramatists Guild, the League of Professional Theatre Women, Honor Roll!, Manhattan Oracles, and the International Centre for Women Playwrights (ICWP), where she was a board member for five years. She has had monologues published from Because of Beth (Audition Monologues for Young Women #2: More Contemporary Auditions for Aspiring Actresses", by Gerald Ratliff, 2013) and Runtime Error in Smith & Kraus' Best Monologues for Men 2022. She was the co-founding chair of the ICWP 50/50 Applause Awards, recognizing those theaters who were producing women in at least 50% of a given season. During the pandemic, Elana founded Four Walls Theater which produced socially responsible theatre virtually. Elana received her MFA in Playwriting from Spalding University and her BA from Oberlin College.

Her work has received development and support through the Pittsburgh Public Theater, where she is a member of the PPT Playwrights Collective,  as well as City Theatre Company, The Hangar Theatre, Alliance/Kendeda, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Pittsburgh Opera, the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, Bloomsburg University’s Plays in Bloom Residency, and the Kennedy Center’s Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center Fellowship. She was a two-time National Finalist for the Kennedy Center's John Cauble Award for Outstanding Short Play for her plays BOXED IN and ONDINE'S CURSE, and a Second Place winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Script Competition for her screenplay, EGGHEAD GENIUS. She holds a B.A. in Creative Writing and Theater from Oberlin College and an M.F.A. in Dramatic Writing from Carnegie Mellon University. She teaches Middle School Literary Arts at Pittsburgh CAPA and serves as Pittsburgh's Regional Co-Representative for the Dramatist Guild.

Kander's film work includes scores for Something for Everyone (1969), A Matter of Time (1976), Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Still of the Night (1982), Blue Skies Again (1983), Places in the Heart (1984), I Want to Go Home (1989) and Billy Bathgate (1991), and songs for New York, New York (1977), Cabaret (1972), Funny Lady (1975) and French Postcards (1979). Kander and Ebb also collaborated on music for several television specials. In 1974 they won an Emmy Award and Grammy Award for their work on Liza with a ‘Z.' They won another Emmy in 1993 for Liza Minnelli in London, Steppin' Out. Other television projects featured Goldie Hawn, Shirley MacLaine, and Michael Baryshnikov. In addition to his Tony, Grammy, and Emmy awards, Kander received honorary doctorate degrees from Oberlin College and Niagara University, the President's Award from the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, the Kennedy Center Honors, and the Oscar Hammerstein Award for Lifetime Achievement in Musical Theatre.

Broadway credits include Peter Pan (1990), Hamlet (1992), Company (1993), My Fair Lady (1993), Beauty and the Beast (1994), State Fair (1996), Twelfth Night (1998), Aida (2000), Seussical (2000), The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (2005), Tarzan (2006), A Chorus Line (2006), The Little Mermaid (2008), The Addams Family (2010), Elf (2010), Sister Act (2011), Follies (2011), Once (2012), Motown the Musical (2013), Aladdin (2014), An American in Paris (2015), School of Rock (2015), Hello, Dolly! (2017), Frozen (2018), The Prom (2018), Burn This (2019), All My Sons (2019), MJ The Musical (2022), Some Like It Hot (2022), Sweeney Todd (2023), Grey's House (2023), Hell's Kitchen (2024), Othello (2025), and John Proctor is the Villain (2025). Katz was awarded the Tony Award for Best Lighting Design in a Play for The Coast of Utopia (2007), The Glass Menagerie (2014), Long Day's Journey into Night (2016) and the Tony Award for Best Lighting Design in a Musical for Aida (2000), Once (2012), An American in Paris (2015), MJ The Musical (2022), and Sweeney Todd (2023). 

Select Off-Bway & Regional theatre includes: Unknown Soldier (Arena Stage); I Can Get It For You Wholesale and Assassins (Drama Desk Nomination) both at CSC; Fun Home at the Public Theater (Lucille Lortell Award); The Cradle Will Rock (City Center); Stephen Sondheim & James Lapine’s Passion at CSC (Drama League Award Nomination); the U.S. premiere of Sunset Boulevard (Los Angeles), Three Sisters (Intiman Theatre), Eli’s Comin’ (Obie Award). Other film and television appearances include: tick, tick…boom (Netflix); Dear Edward (Apple TV); Enchanted (Disney); Elementary (CBS); Hope & Faith (ABC); Law & Order (NBC); My Favorite Broadway: The Leading Ladies (PBS), The Kennedy Center Honors (CBS); The Les Miserables 10th Anniversary Concert (PBS). Judy has performed on concert stages around the world including appearances at Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, The Hollywood Bowl, and the The Royal Albert Hall. She can be heard on numerous original cast recordings as well as her four solo CD’s.

Rachel was also part of the inaugural writer group for the Oberlin Screenwriting Intensive (OSI). Acting credits include: Off Broadway: The Christians (Playwrights Horizons), Lili Marlene (St. Luke's Theater), and Before a League (Actors Temple Theater). NYC Theatre: Henry VI Parts 1 and 2, Compulsion, Barges, Eden, Will Wilson Saves the World. Most recently, Rachel wrote a gothic horror golem tale for Feminist Fairytales Season 2. She is currently a cohort member of PlayGround-NY. In all of her creative work, Rachel strives to highlight gray morality and female-centered voices throughout history. She hopes to find humor in horror and lessons in frivolity.

After moving back to Boston in 2020, she became a founding repertory member of the socially distanced Worlds Elsewhere Theatre Company, and its TTRPG spin-off, Fantasy Worlds Elsewhere, performing in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Lysistrata, MacDeath: An Actual Play, Musica Universalis, and Coriolanus, and directing the 2022 production of The Roaring Girl. They returned to the physical stage in 2021 as part of the cast for the world premiere of The Glassblower's Daughter, and continue to work on their writing, as well as hosting Six Degrees of Star Wars, a movie connections podcast, in their free time.

Other Broadway credits include Henry IV (2003), Old Acquaintance (2007), and A View from the Bridge (2010) as well as off-Broadway credits such as Intimate Apparel (Drama Desk nomination, 2004), Some Americans Abroad (2008), Beast (2008), Troilus and Cressida (2016), Plenty (2016), Julius Caesar (2017), Othello (2018), Macbeth (2019). Some additional highlights from his extensive film and television career include The Seagull (2018), First Man (2018), The Report (2019), West Side Story (2021), Rebel Moon (2023), Law & Order: LA (2010-2011), The Strain (2014-2017), Girls (2016-2017), and Transatlantic (2023). 

Her stage adaptation of The Lion King debuted in 1997, and received eleven Tony Award nominations. Taymor has the distinction of being the first woman to receive the Tony Award for "Best Direction of a Musical," which she won for The Lion King. She also received a Tony Award for her original costume designs for the production. Other Broadway credits include: Juan Darien (Book, Director, Scenic Design, Costume Design, Puppet Design, Mask Design), The Green Bird (Director, Puppet Design, Mask Design), Spider-Man Turn Off The Dark (Co-Book Writer, Director, Mask Designer), M. Butterfly (Director, Dramaturg).