Creative Team Bios
Muriel Miguel (Kuna/Rappahannock) – Creator, Writer and Performer
Muriel Miguel’s work as a solo artist includes directing, performing, and teaching around the United States and Canada. She was an original member of Joseph Chaikin's Open Theater, one of the leading alternative theater companies of the 1960s, where she performed in the groundbreaking plays Terminal, The Serpent, Mere Ubu, and Viet Rock. Muriel studied modern dance with Alwin Nickolai at the Henry Street Playhouse and with Erick Hawkins and Jean Erdman. She is a co-founder of the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers.
Choreography & directing credits include Spiderwoman Theater’s complete repertory, Throw Away Kids and She Knew She Was She at the Banff Centre, the original and touring productions of The Scrubbing Project with Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble, and Evening in Paris with co-creator Michelle Olson.
Stage credits include Philomena Moosetail in The Rez Sisters, Aunt Shadie in The Unnatural and Accidental Women, Martha in Buz’Gem Blues, and Spirit Woman in BONES: An Aboriginal Dance Opera. She has created the one-woman shows Hot' N' Soft, Trail of the Otter, and most recently Red Mother.
Muriel was an Assistant Professor of Drama at Bard College. She is an instructor of Indigenous Performance at the Centre for Indigenous Theatre’s full-time program in Toronto and Program Director for their summer intensive in Storyweaving and performance at the University of Lethbridge. She was a Program Director for the Aboriginal Dance Program at The Banff Centre and an instructor there for seven years.
She has developed four shows for The Minnesota Native American AIDS Task Force working with inner city native youth on HIV/AIDS issues.
Muriel has most recently been profiled in the book American Women Stage Directors of the 20th Century.
Murielle Borst-Tarrant (Kuna/Rappahannock) – Director
Murielle Borst has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Theatre and Dance from Long Island University and interned with Spiderwoman Theater as part of their 1992 Power Pipes tour. She has also studied at Uta Hagen’s HB Studio.
Her one woman show More than Feathers and Beads was nominated for a Rockefeller grant in 2001 and was selected from the United States to participate in the Global Indigenous Theater Festival, produced at the Sydney Opera House.
She is currently Artistic Director of The SilverCloud Singers and Dancers, a traditional drum and dance group that has toured internationally. She won a Native Heart Award from the Native American Music Awards for her spoken verse on the song Tears from the SilverCloud Singers’ Visions from the City CD.
She has completed six books of her fantasy series, The Star Song Carriers and is working on her seventh. Her play More than Feathers and Beads has been published in Staging Coyote's Dream: An Anthology of First Nations Staging Drama in English, Volume II. Her analysis of the Spiderwoman Theater methodology, The Spiderwoman Legacy has been published in Performing Worlds into Being: Native American Women’s Theaterfrom Miami University Press.
She is Editor in Chief of EastCoastNative.com, an electronic magazine that addresses the political, artistic, and social issues which affect Native people in urban areas and across the east coast of the United States and Canada.
Christine Plunkett — Set and Costume Designer
Christine Plunkett has been designing for over twenty years in the theatre, television, film, and special-event industries. Upcoming productions include audience environment realization for The Lord of the Rings (Mirvish Productions), Annie Mae’s Movement international tour, and Red Mother. Selected recent design credits include Agua for Earth in Motion in Mexico City, The Scrubbing Project National tour (Turtle Gals), Dead White Writer on the Floor for the Centre for Indigenous Theatre, After All for bcurrent, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf for The ColoUred Girls, The Unnatural and Accidental Women, Tales of an Urban Indian and Annie Mae’s Movement among others for Native Earth Performing Arts, BONES: An Aboriginal Dance Opera at the Banff Centre for the Arts (as both Designer and Faculty), Nymph Errant, among others (Shaw Festival) and A Moon for the Misbegotten among others (Grand Theatre London).
Don White — Lighting Designer
Don White has been involved in theatre for over 30 years. He is an award-winning actor and producer as well as having spent many years in technical theatre. He spent two decades as a technical director in dance, musical theatre, rock and many other artistic disciplines. Don is the resident lighting designer and technical director for Nozhem First Peoples Performance Space at Trent University. He is the lighting designer for the Centre for Indigenous Theatre’s Summer Program and has designed lighting for The Threshing Floor, Indian Blue, and Red Mother.
Russell Wallace(Stla’limx) — Composer and Sound Designer
Russell Wallace is a composer and producer of contemporary electronic music and is a traditional Lil’wat singer. Wallace music has been part of a number of soundtracks (film, video, television) and theatre/dance productions. He was the composer in residence for the Chinook Winds Aboriginal Dance program from1996-2003 at the Banff Centre for the Arts. He has produced CDs that have been nominated for awards at the Junos, Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards, and at the Native American Music Awards in the United States. Currently Wallace works with his family singing group Tzo’kam and teaches at the Native Education Centre.
Wallace was commissioned by the Nunavut Government to compose music for the Formation of Nunavut Gala in April 1999, by the University of Toronto for Aboriginal Music Days in 2000, and by the Westcoast Sacred Arts Society in Vancouver to compose a new choral work with Hussein Janmohamed for the Dalai Lama’s visit to Vancouver in 2004.
Currently, Wallace works with his family singing group Tzo’kam in Vancouver. Tzo’kam performs traditional Lillooet songs and teaches aspects of Lillooet culture in schools, community events, and concert settings. Before the passing of Flora Wallace, the group was made up of three generations of singers. Now, Tzo’kam carries on the work that Flora started with two generations. Russell works with his daughter Justine Wallace in demonstrating some of the traditional dances of the Lillooet people (which they learned from Flora).
Bear Thomas(Onondaga) — Projection Designer
Ottawa-based media artist Ehren Bear Witness Thomas has been producing short experimental videos for over five years. Bear was recently awarded the Aboriginal International Residency Exchange in Australia by the Canada Council for the Arts. During his residency at Parramatta Artists Studios he will be having a solo-exhibition as part of the 2010 Sydney Festival. Bear’s video “Apanatschi and Her Red Headed Wrestler” was selected for the 2009 Berlin International Film Festival, as part of the Culture Shock program. The Culture Shock program first screened at the 2008 ImagiNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival which was commissioned by ImagiNATIVE in partnership with the Goethe Institute and the National Gallery of Canada. In 2008, his video “BrokeDickDog” was included in the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography exhibition Steeling the Gaze: Portraits of Aboriginal Artists curated by Andrea Kunard and Steven Loft and hosted by the National Gallery of Canada. Bear also exhibited two new videos as part of Drive By: A Road Trip with Jeff Thomas at The University of Toronto Art Centre. His current projects include working with his father, visual artist and curator Jeff Thomas in preparation for the upcoming exhibition Home Land and Security at Render Gallery in Waterloo and producing a new video for the South Asian Visual Artists Centre’s upcoming exhibition. Bear’s other work includes producing live audio-visual performances that incorporate both his video and djing skills. Recently, Bear co-founded A Tribe Called Red, a Native DJ collective that hosts a monthly event, Electric Pow Wow.