WATERWELL PRODUCTIONS INC

Waterwell (Lee Sunday Evans, Artistic Director; Sarah Scafidi, Managing Director; Heather Lanza, Director of Education; Arian Moayed, co-founder and Board Chair) is a non-profit, civic-minded theater and education company that strives to prove itself a vital presence in the lives of its audience by remaining always responsive: responsive to the events affecting the world, to changing modes of expression, and to the individuals attending each performance. Through entertainment and arts education, Waterwell hopes to inspire audiences and students to change their lives and the world in which they live. The company’s two most recent productions were a dual-language, English-Farsi Hamlet, and Blueprint Specials, a collection of short musicals written during WWII performed by a 60+ cast comprised of veterans and professional actors on the hangar deck of the Intrepid Air + Space Museum. Founded in 2002 by Arian Moayed and Tom Ridgely, the company’s blend of music, theater, and social dialogue has been nominated for a Drama Desk, a New York Magazine Culture Award, and a Village Voice Best of NYC. The New York Times hails the company’s work as, “brilliant, original, and inspired. Alive enough to surprise even the performers themselves,” and TheaterMania writes, “Waterwell has staked a claim on our collective conscience.” Since 2003, Waterwell has offered structured classes in collaborative play-making, or “devising." By 2010, those educational activities had grown and coalesced into the Waterwell Drama Program, which now delivers – in partnership with the Professional Performing Arts School (PPAS) – top-quality, year-round, in-school theater training to over 200 NYC public school students. The program cultivates the student-artist holistically, demands that they develop both as an interpreter and as a creator, and aims to place their work in dialogue with what's going on outside the classroom - in their homes, communities, and the world at large.