Theatre

Maria Broom

Although nationally known as an actress for her recurring roles in HBO’s The Wire and The Corner, Maria Broom is also a storyteller and dancer with more than 40 years of experience performing and teaching in the United States and across the globe.

She is a Fulbright scholar and former news reporter for the ABC affiliates in Miami and Baltimore. Broom has received many awards and honors, including the Eubie Blake Award, the Sarah’s Circle Award, and the 2004 Governor’s Arts Award for Individual Artist. In 2007, she was named Artist of the Year by Young Audiences of Maryland, Inc.

Broom is also much requested as a speaker and presenter. With a background in yoga, meditation, Homa therapy, and dance therapy, she conducts staff retreats, workshops, and weekly classes that help people to release stress and feel at peace. She was a consultant for Maryland Public Television’s Campaign for Love and Forgiveness, sponsored by Fetzer Institute. She also received an Open Society Institute community fellowship grant to establish a unique mentoring program in City Schools and beyond, called the Dance Girls of Baltimore.

Denise Diggs

Denise Diggs has acted professionally for decades. She played MaMa Moja in the play “In The Red and Brown Water” by Terell McCraney at Studio Theatre in Washington, DC. Other theatre credits include performances at Center Stage, Everyman Theatre, Actor’s Ensemble, The Baltimore Shakespeare Theatre, Olney Theatre, Arena Stage (D.C.), Round House Theatre, Theatre of the First Amendment, and the La Jolla Theatre in San Diego. Diggs received the 1998 Maryland Arts Council Individual Artist Award for her work as an actor, teacher, and promoter of various arts programs throughout Maryland. Her one-person show on Winnie Mandela, which she wrote and performed at the Theatre Project, also contributed to this prestigious award. Diggs has had the honor of teaching voice and speech at the Baltimore School for the Arts since 1981. She has also taught acting in their TWIGS program and was the coordinator of several outreach programs. She is presently teaching voice and acting at the Studio Theatre Acting Conservatory (DC), voice with acting emphasis at Duke Ellington School of the Arts (DC), and is the private instructor for various professionals throughout the Baltimore/Washington area. Her television credits include recurring roles on the Emmy Award-winning Homicide: Life on the Streets, The Corner, and most recently, The Wire. Diggs studied Theatre Arts at Towson University and the Shakespeare Theatre in DC.

Leslie Gray

Leslie Gray is a multimedia artist and has taught weekend workshops with Johns Hopkins’ Baltimore Youth Film Arts program. She has also worked as an art director for short independent films.

Anita Horwath

Anita Horwath holds a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education and has taught creative drama for TWIGS for the past 20 years. She also teaches an after-school drama program for Roland Park Country School. She directs Ages on Stages, an intergenerational improvisational group that includes the BSA sophomores. The group performs in senior centers and high schools around the city.

Brian Kehoe

Nancy Krebs

Nancy Krebs has been a professional actor/singer/musician since 1975 and is a member of all three acting unions. She is a much sought-after dialect/vocal coach for professional theatres in the region. She is also a singer/songwriter/musician and recording artist, having released seven albums of critically acclaimed original Christian meditational music.

She is a certified Lessac Master Teacher, and has been both director and co-director of the Lessac Summer Intensive since 2006, taught with Arthur Lessac and Senior Master Teacher Sue Ann Park from 1995-2005 for the intensive. She also has led and developed numerous shorter Lessac-based workshops throughout the years since 1995, and is now teaching internationally– the most recent South African Lessac Intensive, held in Pretoria, is a good example. She has worked as a vocal/dialect coach for more than 125 professional and university productions in the Baltimore-Washington region since 1994. She teaches a full four-year Lessac-based voice curriculum in the Theatre Department.

Becky Mossing ’88

Becky Mossing has performed all over America and overseas. Credits include Beauty and the Beast (nat’l tour); Cinderella Waltz (Ubu Rep – Off B’way); Working with Showdown Theatre Arts, in Guildford, United Kingdom; and both productions of Hairspray in Concert with John Waters and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Mossing has narrated weekday and family series concerts for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra including Carnival of the Animals, The Remarkable Farkle McBride, and Wizards and Wands. Becky’s directing credits include The Polar Express with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Working, Our House, Hairspray, and Rent with Showdown Theatre Arts, U.K.

Mossing’s cabaret performances can be seen frequently in the Baltimore area. Mossing has been BSA’s musical theatre instructor for more than a decade and directs the Hippodrome Foundation’s summer theatre camp intensives. She is a graduate of the Baltimore School for the Arts and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she received the Outstanding Achievement Award in Musical Theatre. She received her master’s in teaching degree from Goucher College and has dual certification in K-8 general and special education.

Richard Pilcher

Richard Pilcher has been the principal acting teacher at BSA since the school opened. He has performed on and off-Broadway as well as in resident theatres locally and throughout the United States. He was nominated for a Helen Hayes award for his leading role in Poster of the Cosmos with the Potomac Theatre Project. Film performances include Tuck Everlasting, Serial Mom, and The Replacements; for television he has appeared in Veep and The Wire, and he played the recurring role of Sgt. Deutch on Homicide: Life on the Streets. He has directed numerous productions at BSA and with other schools and professional theatre companies. He is a certified teacher of the Alexander Technique, a method of learning to move with greater ease and energy. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Missouri at Kansas City and his master’s degree from Notre Dame University of Maryland.

Paul Reisman

Paul Reisman is a professional actor, director, and playwright. Locally, his work has been seen at the Kennedy Center, Shakespeare Theatre Company, Taffety Punk, dog & pony, Flying V, Spooky Action Theatre, Best Medicine Rep, We Happy Few, and others. Regionally, at venues including the American Shakespeare Center, Shakespeare Theatre of NJ, 12 Miles West, TheatreFest, and the American Globe Theatre. His voice can be heard on many audiobooks for GraphicAudio.  He is also the producing artistic director of Faction of Fools – DC’s award-winning Commedia dell’Arte company.

As an educator, he has taught at Shepherd University and Knox College, as well as for Faction of Fools, Shakespeare Theatre Company, Imagination Stage, ETC, Traveling Players Ensemble, and the Smithsonian, among others. He has trained extensively in physical theatre, Lecoq, clown, and Commedia under Christopher Bayes, Dody DiSanto, Matthew R. Wilson, and Maestro Antonio Fava. He has an M.F.A. from the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Academy for Classical Acting at the George Washington University and a B.F.A. from Montclair State University.

Susan Rome ’82

Susan Rome is a member of the first graduating class of Baltimore School for the Arts. She has a thriving stage career. For the 2018-19 season, she will perform in productions at Studio Theatre (DC), Arena Stage (DC), Kansas City Rep (KC, MO), Baltimore Center Stage, and Folger Shakespeare Theatre (DC). She was in season 1-4 of The Wire, and has two films coming out this year. She is the proud mother of Seamus.

Kristina Szilagyi

Kristina Szilagyi earned a B.A. in Theatre Studies and Comparative Literature from Wellesley College and studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. Before joining BSA, she was the education coordinator at Baltimore Center Stage. Locally, Szilagyi has performed with Single Carrot Theater, the Baltimore Shakespeare Factory, Annex Theater at Le Mondo, and Baltimore Center Stage’s Mobile Unit, and she has been a guest artist at Notre Dame of Maryland University and the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Susan Taylor

Susan Taylor, CMA, LCSW-C, RPT-S, has taught collaboration, body awareness technique, and play to actors and designers, clients and clinicians, babies and elders, families and scholars, individuals, dyads, and groups across the nation using music, movement, rhythm, and humor. Susan has been teaching movement to acting and stage design and production students in the Theatre Department at BSA since 1995. A Laban-Bartenieff Certified Movement Analyst, Susan has additional specific expertise in mindfulness, undoing racism, and LGBTQ issues. She specializes in connecting images, intention, emotions, and sensations in mind and body with improvisation and text in her work with young actors and designers. Susan has published on a variety of subjects, such as teaching movement to adolescents, parent-child attachment, mindfulness, use of movement and body awareness in psychotherapy, and African-American women’s history.