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A professional theater-maker for more than 25 years, Mr. Parry made his name in the Dallas theater community first as co-founder and Co-Artistic Director of the nationally-acclaimed Undermain Theatre, established in 1984. He gained recognition as an award-winning director/actor and a savvy and experienced producer, participating in more than 70 productions at Undermain, Dallas Theater Center, Shakespeare Festival of Dallas, Kitchen Dog Theater, Alley Theater in Houston, Zachary Scott Theater in Austin, and others. He is a three-time recipient of Outstanding Actor by Dallas Theatre Critics Forum Awards, a five-time recipient of Outstanding Director by Dallas Theatre Critics Forum, and a two-time winner of the Leon Rabin Award for Best Director. In 2006 he received the Standing Ovation award from the Dallas Theatre League for his ongoing contributions to the theatre scene in North Texas. He premiered and/or commissioned seven new plays at the Undermain, two of which were published through Sun and Moon Press. In addition to his work at Project X, Mr. Parry is the Executive & Artistic Director of Shakespeare Dallas, Director of Arts and Letters Live - Texas Bound at the Dallas Museum of Art.

Thomas Riccio is a Professor of Performance Studies and Artistic Director of Story Lab at the University of Texas at Dallas. Previous positions include Professor of Theatre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Artistic Director of Chicago's Organic Theater Company and the Dramaturg/Resident Director at the Cleveland Play House. He also served as Associate Literary Director at the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard and was research assistant to Robert Brustein. As a free-lance director he staged productions at the Teatro d’ Roma (national theatre of Italy), La Mama ETC, and The New York Theatre Workshop, among others. He received his MFA from Boston University and studied in the PhD program in Performance Studies at New York University. He has directed nearly one hundred plays in nearly every genre. In recent years he has worked extensively in the area of indigenous performance, serving as Artistic Director of Tuma Theatre, an Alaska Native performance group in Fairbanks. He has developed and directed performances with the Zulu of South Africa, the Sakha National Theatre of central Siberia, the Greenland Inuit, several tribal groups in Zambia, Sri Lankan Tamils, the !Xuu and Khwe Bushmen of the lower Kalahari, and a pre-Christian Slavic group in St. Petersburg. He has conducted workshops and presented lectures throughout the U.S. and Internationally he has conducted workshops and/or lectures in Sweden, Germany, Finland, England, Denmark, Australia, South Africa, Zambia, China, Indonesia, Korea, Kenya, Burkina Faso, and recently at Jagalonian University and the National Drama School in Krakow, Poland. His current preoccupations are in the vectoring of myth, ritual, shamanism, media, and technology. He was a Visiting Professor at the Korean National University for the Arts, the University of Nairobi, the University of Dar es Salaam, and The California Institute of Integral Studies where he taught Drama Therapy. His scholarly writings have appeared in TDR, TheatreForum, PAJ, Performing Arts Journal Theatre Topics, Theatre Research International, Performing Arts Journal, and Shamans Drum. Books published, Reinventing Traditional Alaska Native Performance by Mellen Press (2003) and Performing Africa: Remixing Tradition, Theater and Culture, Peter Lang (2007). He is the recipient of several national and international grants for his scholarship and intercultural work: APPEX (Asian Pacific Performance Exchange) fellowship at UCLA, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Finnish Volunteer Service, the US Information Service, the Embassy of the Netherlands, The British Council, the Alaska State Council on the Arts, and the Swedish International Development Agency, among others. He is the author of over thirty plays and adaptations and a recipient of an Alexander Onassis Foundation International Prize for Distinction in Playwrighting (2006). His musical play Comeback Für Elvis was produced by Frankfurt’s Kleist Theatre and ran in repertory for a year. For the Fairbanks Drama Association he wrote and directed a highly acclaimed production of Pipe Dreams, a play based on oral histories from the building of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. His recent and current work blends performance, installation, video and audio soundscapes to create performance immersions. There is Never a Reference Point (Story Lab and Project X, 2006), marked his first large-scale performance immersion project. The immersion was inspired by the life and writings of a woman with multiple personality disorder; audiences entered into a mediated space performed by each of her eight personalities. Performance immersion and installation projects in development for Project X, a post-disciplinary collective in Dallas include, This Has Been Fun and Factory Girl. He is currently developing Simulations, a docudrama series of twenty-one performance fragments. He will direct the first two fragments during the summer of 2008 for Project X at the FIT Festival of Independent Theatres, Dallas. During the fall of 2008 he will adapt and direct the classic expressionistic silent film, The Cabinet of Doctor Calagari, for the stage for UTD’s Story Lab. Riccio is also the Lead Narrative Engineer for Hanson Robotics, Inc. for whom he co-authored several robot personalities including the Einstein, featured at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, NYC (2006-07), and Zeno, featured at Wire Magazine’s 2007 NextFest. www.thomas-riccio.net