Designer/Artist

Brenda is a New York-based artist and costume designer for stage and film. Her career began as an assistant on and off-Broadway working with designers from William Ivey Long to Ann Roth. She received an MFA in design from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. There she had the opportunity to work with theater and film directors with whom she would develop long-term collaborative relationships.

Brenda’s design career started in the independent film and theater scene and overtime matured into larger ventures with many of her collaborators. She has had the opportunity to work in many genres and styles and do projects as varied as SNL, Oscar Nominated and Golden Globe Winner: THE DISASTER ARTIST, and THE WOLF HOUR with Naomi Watts. Her upcoming projects include Sian Heder’s CODA and Simon Rich’s AN AMERICAN PICKLE directed by Brandon Trost.

Brenda has also designed numerous off-Broadway and regional plays. Many with Rachel Chavkin and the New York theater company THE TEAM. She has also worked with Lyndsey Turner, Daniel Aukin, Heather Christian, and Annie Tippe and most recently designed Dave Malloy’s and Rachel Chavkin’s MOBY DICK at A.R.T.

Brenda resides downtown NY with her husband, baby boy and two cats.

Performer/Artist

Denée Benton is a Tony Award-nominated actress who stars as Peggy Scott in the critically acclaimed HBOMax series, “The Gilded Age”. She was last seen in the new Peacock feature film, “GENIE”, and the independent feature, “Our Friend”, which premiered at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival. She previously starred as ‘Ruby’ in the second season of Lifetime’s acclaimed television series “UnREAL”.

She recently returned to Broadway as Cinderella starring in the hit revival of the Tony Award Winning production of “Into The Woods”, a role she originated last year in the Encores!, City Center, Production, for which she garnered rave reviews. She also starred as ‘Eliza’ in Broadway’s Tony Award-winning musical “Hamilton” and is well known for starring as ‘Natasha’ in the Broadway production of “Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812”. For “The Great Comet”, Benton was nominated for the 2017 Tony Award, Drama League Distinguished Performance Award, Theatre World Award, and Lilly Award. She had previously played the role of ‘Natasha’ at the American Repertory Theater and starred as ‘Nabulungi’ in the West End and U.S. national tour of “The Book of Mormon”.

Benton is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University.

Performer/Artist

Eric Berryman is a Baltimore born, NYC based artist whose main medium tends to be acting. He is involved in work that he believes his great-grandmother would dig. Recent theatrical credits: Alien/Nation (Williamstown Theatre Festival); The B-Side: Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons, A Record Album Interpretation (Wooster Group/St. Ann’s Warehouse-Drama Desk Nomination); MOBY DICK, A Musical Reckoning (A.R.T.); Detroit Red (ArtsEmerson-Elliot Norton Award); Toni Stone (Roundabout Theater). Recent Film/TV credits: “Bonding,” “Marriage Story” (NETFLIX); “Evil” (PARAMOUNT+); “Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”, “Empathy Inc” (AMAZON); “Motherless Brooklyn.” Training: The Baltimore School for the Arts; BFA: Carnegie Mellon University

Stage Manager/Artist

Jhanaë Bonnick-McDonnell (she/her/hers) is a Caribbean-American AEA Stage Manager and Administrator who is passionate about the power of language, education, and community. Committed to cultivating the future of the industry and the world, Jhanaë finds her most fulfilling work is on material steeped in working towards collective liberation in ways both big and small. She is a core leader in Everybody Black – a new membership organization whose goal is to make the American Theatre Industry not only anti-racist, but pro-Black and she was recently selected for the inaugural list of “Women to Watch on Broadway.” Credits include – With the TEAM: Reconstruction and Primer for a Failed Superpower. Broadway: Caroline, or Change, Slave Play, Hadestown, Gary, Six Degrees of Separation, and The Cherry Orchard. Select Off-Broadway: Octet, Rags Parkland Sings the Songs of the Future, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire. Select Regional: Lempicka. BA SUNY New Paltz. @jhanaekcb

Performer/Artist

With the TEAM, Frank co-wrote and performed in Architecting and Particularly In the Heartland. Frank is also a member of Elevator Repair Service, with whom he performed in Gatz and The Select (The Sun Also Rises). In 2015, Frank will be performing on tour with Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company in Straight White Men. Other credits include the world premieres of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay with Seattle’s Book-It Repertory Theater (Seattle Times Footlight Award) and Red Speedo by Lucas Hnath at the Studio Theatre in Washington DC. Frank is the creator of The Holler Sessions, a one man show about jazz, for which he partnered with the TEAM to create and produce. The Holler Sessions premiered at On the Boards in Seattle in January 2015. Holler will make its European premiere at the Noorderzon Performing Arts Festival in The Netherlands in August 2015 and its New York premiere in January 2016. Film credits include: Almost Family (2014) and B.U.S.T (2010). Frank went to NYU and is from East Lansing, MI.

Director & Founding Artistic Director

RACHEL CHAVKIN received the 2019 Tony Award, Drama Desk Award, and Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Director of a Musical for “Hadestown.” She is a director, writer, and dramaturg, as well as the founding Artistic Director of Brooklyn-based ensemble The TEAM, whose work has been seen all over New York (including the Public Theater and PS122), nationally, the UK (including the National Theatre in London, and multiple collaborations w/ the National Theatre of Scotland), and Festivals across Europe, Australia, and Asia. The TEAM’s consensus-drive collaborative creation process was the subject of a feature-length documentary by Emmy Winner Paulette Douglas.

Selected work: Dave Malloy’s “Natasha, Pierre, & The Great Comet of 1812” (Ars Nova, ART, Broadway), Matt Gould and Carson Kreitzer’s “Lempicka” (Williamstown, La Jolla, Broadway), Caryl Churchill’s “Light Shining in Buckinghamshire” (New York Theatre Workshop), Marco Ramirez’s “The Royale” (Old Globe, Lincoln Center), Bess Wohl’s “Small Mouth Sounds” (Ars Nova, Off-Broadway, national tour), Sarah Gancher’s “I’ll Get You Back Again” (Round House), and multiple collaborations with Taylor Mac including “The Lily’s Revenge, Act 2” (HERE). Her upcoming projects include the direction of the feature film “Shrew’s Nest” and the new musical “Gatsby”. She is a proud Usual Suspect of the NEW YORK Theater Workshop, and a member of Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC).

Performer/Artist

Writer

Eisa Davis (she/her) is a writer, composer, and performer who is on the writing team for Reconstructing. A recipient of a Creative Capital Award, an Obie for Sustained Excellence in Performance, the Herb Alpert Award in Theater, and a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her play Bulrusher. Davis wrote and starred in the stage memoir Angela’s Mixtape. Other works include Paper Armor, Umkovu, Hip Hop Anansi, Six Minutes, The History Of Light (Barrymore nomination), Warriors Don’t Cry, Ramp (Ruby Prize), ||: Girls :||: Chance :||: Music :||:, The Essentialisn’t, and Mushroom. A multivolume series of her plays is soon to be published by 53rd State Press. She led the 2021 black femme celebration of Kathleen Collins’ work AFROFEMONONOMY // WORK THE ROOTS, and she has recorded two albums of her original music — Something Else and Tinctures — and has enjoyed a multi-decade career as a performer on stage and screen. Current projects for the stage include the libretto for an opera adaptation of Bulrusher and the music and lyrics for Devil In A Blue Dress. An alumna of New Dramatists, she has received residencies, awards, and fellowships from the Hermitage Artist Retreat, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Helen Merrill Foundation, the Van Lier and Mellon Foundations, New Dramatists, and Cave Canem. Davis was born and raised in the Bay Area and lives in Brooklyn. eisadavis.com

Co-Founder

Stephanie Douglass is a performer, farmer, writer, and trainer. She is a co-host of This Much Is True and of Do Not Submit, Englewood, and tells stories throughout the U.S.

Stephanie is a Moth GrandSLAM Champion. She was the head writer for OLN’s “Outside Magazine’s Ultimate Top Ten,” and is currently a staff writer for The Paper Machete. In 2014, she had the pleasure of co-producing The 25th Annual Chicago’s Biggest Liar Contest. Off-stage, she is the Farm Enterprise Director for Growing Home, Inc., which uses organic farming to train and empower Chicagoans with barriers to employment.

She spends her off-season working with Cyahafi Blooms, developing sustainable programming for rural women, in southwestern Uganda.

Composer/Artist

JJJJJerome Ellis is a composer, poet, and performer. His current practice explores blackness, music, and disabled speech as forces of refusal and healing. 

photo by: Gema Galiana

Stage Manager

(he/they) Upcoming: I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan (The Atlantic); Previous Credits include -Broadway: The Ferryman, Head Over Heels. Recent New York: An American Soldier (PAC NYC), I Love You So Much I Could Die (NYTW), Amusements, School Pictures (Playwrights Horizons), The Appointment (Lightning Rod Special), Oratorio for Living Things (Ars Nova), Only An Octave Apart (St. Ann’s Warehouse); as well as previous productions at MCC, Second Stage, The Public, MTC, and Juilliard. Regional & Opera: La Calisto (The Glimmerglass Festival), Henry V, Penelope (Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival), and A Wrinkle in Time, Annie Salem (NYS&F). Many thanks to The TEAM Staff, the Reconstructing Creative team, and especially Ada and Kiara. 

Designer/Artist

Katherine Freer is a multimedia artist, filmmaker, organizer, and educator. Her artistic practice lives at the intersection of story, technology, and civic engagement. It is rooted in joy, curiosity, mutual learning, and the pursuit of justice for all living beings. She is a core collaborator with All My Relations Collective, Projections Design Instructor at University of the Arts (Philadelphia), and a Teaching Artist with Roundabout Education. She is a proud member of Wingspace Theatrical Design and United Scenic Artists Local 829. katherinefreer.com

Co-Founder/Performer

Jill is a founding member of the TEAM and created/performed roles in A Thousand Natural Shocks, Particularly in the Heartland, Architecting, Mission Drift, and Primer For A Failed Superpower. She has been on the TEAM Board of Directors from its inception. As part of the TEAM’s Petri Projects, she wrote and performed An Exit Ticket, based on her experiences as an NYC DOE special education teacher. Jill originated roles in the premiere of Tectonic Theatre Company’s Uncommon Sense, appeared in the indie feature Feast Of The Epiphany, and recorded several YA audiobooks. These days she is the Education Manager for Funny Girls, a program of The Harnisch Foundation. Jill was an NYC Teaching Fellow, earned her MST at Pace and BFA at NYU. 

Performer/Artist

Theatre: Hadestown (Broadway, The National Theatre London, The Citadel, New York Theatre Workshop); Natasha, Pierre, and The Great Comet of 1812 (Broadway, Kazino, Ars Nova); An Octoroon (Theatre for a New Audience, Soho Rep, PS 122), Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma! (Bard SummerScape), Taylor Mac’s A 24 Decade History of Popular Music: 1900’s-1950’s (New York Live Arts with Under the Radar), The TEAM’s Mission Drift, Primer for a Failed Superpower, and the upcoming Reconstruction; and 15 years with Reverend Billy and The Church of Stop Shopping.  TV/Film: Showtime’s Escape At Dannemora; Amazon’s upcoming limited series Underground Railroad and movie Master.  MFA: NYU Graduate Acting

Performer

With the TEAM, Brian Hastert has created roles in Mission Drift (The National Theatre (London), Culturgest (Lisbon), Edinburgh, NYC), Particularly in the Heartland (Traverse Theatre (Edinburgh)), and A Thousand Natural Shocks, and helped develop Primer for a Failed Superpower, Waiting for You on the Corner of…, and the TEAM/National Theatre of Scotland collaboration Anything That Gives Off Light. Other recent performance credits include the world premier of All My Fathers (La MaMa), the New York premier of Tectonic Theatre Project’s Uncommon Sense, Of Good Stock (Manhattan Theatre Company). TV: Happy!, The Deuce, Allegiance, Flesh and Bone, The Good Wife, I Love You… But I Lied, The Vampire Leland (pilot). Radio: Twelve Years (BBC4). MFA – Yale School of Drama. As an educator, Brian created the Acting for Film, Television, Voice Over, and Commercials BFA program at Pace University.

Brian is the host of the Local Selection podcast, in which he is on a quest to make local level democracy sexy. Other evidence of professional shenanigans can be found at brianhastert.com.