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Artist Bios

Phantom Limb Company (The Puppet Cycle Creators), New York City-based, creates iconic stories that are built on an intersection of innovation, social change and visual art, with a particular focus on the climate emergency and environmental injustice. Collaging puppetry, movement, multi-media storytelling and design, this unique integration of social impact and aesthetic is essential to their work. 

They are truth seekers, storytellers and deep believers in the power of collaboration to inspire engagement and action.

Best known for The Environmental Trilogy, over the course of the past decade, PLC developed three works for Brooklyn Academy of Music that grappled with human relationship to nature and climate change through several different lenses. 

The company is most often comprised of a large rotating cast of friends, collaborators, artists, dancers actors and puppeteers.  They have collaborated with Tony Taccone, Lemony Snicket, Danny Elfman, Jim Jarmusch, The Kronos Quartet, Gavin Friday, Ryan Heffington, Jeffery Zeigler, Dai Matsuoka, Henrik Vibskov, Sophie Hunter, Jen Silverman, and Dipika Guha among other luminaries. phantomlimbcompany.com

Jessica Grindstaff (Founder, Director, and Set Designer) is a New York City-based visual artist, playwright and director. She has been committed to making a concrete difference in all aspects of her artistic career from visual to collaborative. 

For the past decade, Jessica has committed herself almost exclusively to the work of creating a trilogy that explores human relationship to nature or the environment, through several different lenses with her creative partner Erik Sanko. This work has taken her to Antarctica, on an expedition to discover the oldest living tree in the world and finally to Fukushima, where the tsunami and subsequent nuclear meltdown of 2011 have devastated a tremendous area of Northern Japan to this day.

Her writing process has been image and collage based until 2019 when she created her first text based play, an adaptation of Reginald Rose’s 12 Angry Men.  She is currently at work on a new commercial piece of theatre centered on climate injustice and live action philanthropy as well as the 2022 release of Th Puppet Cycle for Brookfield place and a move towards film/television directing. 

Jessica is co-founder and artistic director of Phantom Limb Company.

Erik Sanko (Founder, Puppet Designer, Composer, and Puppeteer) is best known as a fixture of the NYC downtown music scene, having recorded and toured with John Cale, Yoko Ono, Gavin Friday, Jim Carroll, James Chance and the Contortions among others as well as being a 16-year veteran of The Lounge Lizards and his own band, Skeleton Key. In 2006, his first complete puppet play, The Fortune Teller, debuted at HERE Arts Center in New York City. The Kronos Quartet commissioned Erik to co-create “Dear Mme.,” an original music composition and marionette play for the 25th Anniversary of the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In 2007 Erik formed Phantom Limb Company with Jessica Grindstaff, under which all of their subsequent projects have been created, with Erik serving as composer and puppet designer/builder.

With Phantom Limb he has collaborated with Ping Chong, Lemony Snicket, and Danish Theatre Director Rolf Heim though the majority of his work has been focused on creating The Environmental Trilogy. 69 Degrees South, Memory Rings and Falling Out were performed at BAM in 2011, 2016, 2019 with subsequent tours.

Erik has also released two solo records under his own name titled Past Imperfect, Present Tense and Puppet Boy. 

He has taught Puppetry and Performance and Biomimicry and Puppetry at Rhode Island School of Design and Puppetry/Object Manipulation at NYU and The New School as well as workshops in lectures at NYU Abu Dhabi, CalArts and Dartmouth College. When not creating his own work, he is working  as “puppet doctor” for The Lion King on Broadway. He holds a B.F.A. from Cooper Union and has been a closet puppet maker since childhood.

Dipika Guha (playwright, ELEPHANTASIA) was born in Calcutta and raised in Russia and the UK. Her plays include Yoga Play (South Coast Rep, SF Playhouse, Playmakers Rep & others), The Art of Gaman (Theatre 503, London) and Unreliable (Kansas City Rep). She was the inaugural recipient of the Shakespeare’s Sister Award through the Lark, the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University and the Venturous Fellowship for her play Passing. She is currently writing plays for Manhattan Theatre Club, South Coast Repertory, and Berkeley Rep. For TV, she’s written on American Gods, Sneaky Pete, projects at AMC and Netflix, Black Monday and currently The Marvelous Mrs Maisel on Amazon. She’s currently writing pilots for FilmNation and A24/Fruit Tree. Dipika is a proud member of New Dramatists and the Ma Yi Writers Lab and is an alumnus of the WP Lab, Ars Nova’s Playgroup, Soho Rep W/D Lab, the Geffen Writers Room, Playwrights Foundation and was a Core Writer at the Playwrights Center. Dipika received her BA in English Literature at University College London, was a Frank Knox Fellow at Harvard University and was awarded her MFA from the Yale School of Drama under Paula Vogel.

Jen Silverman (Playwright, FROWN TOWN) is a playwright, novelist, poet and screenwriter. Jen’s plays include COLLECTIVE RAGE: A PLAY IN 5 BETTIES (Woolly Mammoth, MCC, Southwark Playhouse London); THE MOORS (Yale Rep, Playwrights Realm); THE ROOMMATE (Humana Festival, Williamstown, Steppenwolf, South Coast, Long Wharf) and WITCH (Writer’s Theatre, Geffen, Huntington). Jen’s plays have been produced internationally in Australia, the UK, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Spain, and elsewhere. Jen is the author of the debut novel We Play Ourselves and the story collection The Island Dwellers (Random House) and the poetry chapbook Bath, selected by Traci Brimhall for Driftwood Press. Additional work has appeared in Vogue, The Paris Review, Literary Hub, Ploughshares, the Yale Review and elsewhere. Jen wrote THE MIRANDA OBSESSION as a narrative podcast for Audible/ Vice, starring Rachel Brosnahan. Jen is a three-time MacDowell Fellow, a member of New Dramatists, and an Affiliated Artist with New Georges, Clubbed Thumb, Space on Ryder Farm, and the Playwrights Center. Honors: The Helen Merrill Award, the Yale Drama Series Award, the Lilly Award, Fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Jen is a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow for Prose and a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow for Drama. Jen also writes for TV and film. Education: Brown, Iowa, Juilliard.

About The Marie Rader Presenting Series

The Marie Rader Presenting Series at Rowan University brings exceptional artists to campus, enriching the university community and the Greater Southern New Jersey region through expanded performing arts programming, bolstering a robust academic program in dance, music and theatre. Every Marie Rader engagement not only brings an artist to campus to perform, but also offers transformative coaching opportunities for Rowan students, and meaningful exchanges with community partners throughout the region.

Because of the Marie Rader Series, you don't have to travel to New York or Philadelphia to see some of your favorite, most influential leaders in dance, music, theatre and beyond. This series is also designed to introduce you to artists you wouldn't otherwise encounter-- artists who reflect not only the future of performing arts, but who help us envision a better world, right now, right here in South Jersey.

The series is made possible in part through generous support from the Henry M. Rowan Family Foundation via the Marie Rader Memorial Fund and through funds from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts.

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