Who We Are

Valerie is currently the Artistic Director of the Oregon Cabaret Theatre in Ashland, OR and has worked at theaters around the country including: Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Utah Shakespeare Festival, Syracuse Opera, Fresno Grand Opera, Sierra Repertory Theatre, PCPA Theaterfest, among many others.

Julie Simon, Ph.D., RID CI & CT (she/her) is an arts administrator, consultant, educator, interpreter, and accessibility activist. After a lengthy career as an ASL/English interpreter in post-secondary and conference settings, she has spent the last 15 years working in performing arts settings, including 10 seasons at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as Lead Interpreter and as Access Services Coordinator, and 3 years as the Box Office and Accessibility Manager at the Oregon Cabaret Theatre. She is Co-Founder and Board Secretary/Co-Treasurer of the Southern Oregon Consortium for Accessibility in the Arts (SOCAA), and serves on the Program Committee for the Kennedy Center LEAD Conference. As a life-long theater-goer, Julie is working to ensure arts environments are accessible to working professionals and to patrons

Narcissa Vanderlip served as Producing Executive Director of ETC Theatre Company, a performing arts nonprofit she co-founded and ran for 20 years. She has produced youth and professional musicals, Boom Kat Dance Theatre, and Shakespeare in the Gardens outdoor plays, all to audience and critical acclaim. She has organized special events and fundraisers with musical theatre entertainment for ETC and other nonprofits. She developed outreach audiences and volunteer programs for ETC, and created the ETC Community Tours with musical theatre shows for outreach audiences 5 to 105. ETC and Boom Kat’s productions have garnered six Ovation nominations. Their production of “STATIONS” won the Ovation Award for Best Score of a New Musical. ETC co-produced the award-winning Hulu comic webseries “Complete Works”. With a background in film production, Vanderlip has worked on locations from Buffalo to Budapest, with filmmakers Sam Peckinpah, Woody Allen, James Caan, Roger Corman, Julie Corman, and Oscar-winner Claude Lelouch. She grew up in Switzerland and Paris, has a French Baccalauréat with Honors, a B.A. in Philosophy from Cornell and a Masters in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin. She has attended nonprofit management classes and workshops at the Center for Nonprofit Management, the Long Beach Nonprofit Partnership and two years of board development training from the Annenberg Foundation. She has written articles, screenplays, translations in four languages, and is working on an historical dual biography of Frank and Narcissa Vanderlip. After years writing and workshopping a musical based on their childhood at the same strict Swiss boarding school in the Alps, she and her husband Parmer Fuller are launching the cast album and hope the project will bring joy into the wider theatre world. She divides her time between her native Los Angeles and now her beloved Ashland, which she discovered many years ago seeing five festival plays in three days with her 11-year old daughter, who now lives with her family in Ashland as well.

Michael Maag is the Resident Lighting Designer and Production Manager at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Scenographer, Lighting and Projection Artist for Kinetic Light, a Disability Arts Ensemble. Maag is an award-winning designer of lighting, video, and projection for theatre, dance, musicals, opera, and planetariums. He sculpts with light and shadow to create lighting environments that tell a story, believing that lighting in support of the performance is the key to unlocking audiences’ emotions. His designs have been seen on OSF’s stages for the last 25 years, as well as at theatres across the country. Maag has built custom optics for projections in theaters, museums, and planetariums; he also designs and builds electronics and lighting for costumes and scenery. His lighting and projection design for Kinetic Light’s Descent was chosen to represent the United States at the Prague Quadrennial in 2019. Recently their work Wired premiered at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and played at the Shed in NYC. Maag is passionate about bringing the perspective of a disabled artist to technical theatre and design. He has spoken at several theatre and architecture conferences on the importance of access for the disabled artist in technical theatre.