ANYA RICHKIND
got “bitten by the bug” when she was four years old, playing Queen
Vashti in her temple’s Purim Shpiel. Winner of the American
Conservatory Theater’s 2011 Distinguished Young Artist award,
Anya has taken ten years of A.C.T. classes in acting, audition
technique, dialects and more. At A.C.T., Anya performed in three
mainstage productions (A Christmas Carol; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), and four blackbox productions (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; The Wendy Play; Riot; Wild Kate). Anya has written two one-acts: Seplophobia (Honorable Mention for the 2010 Princeton University Ten-Minute Play Contest) and The Secret of Asteraceae,
which will be performed by the A.C.T. Young Conservatory in Hastings
Studio this August. In high school, Anya directed two one-acts, and
founded/organized the Aim High Showcase, a fundraising extravaganza of
student talent (now an annual event at Lick-Wilmerding). Last summer,
Anya was a finalist in the acting category of the Beach Blanket Babylon Scholarship for the Arts
and a Teaching Assistant for the A.C.T. Junior Intensives. Before
heading to Yale College in the fall, Anya is a Teaching Intern at the
educational non-profit Aim High (where she taught 7th grade Humanities last summer) and a Marketing Intern for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.
ALONA BACH was too shy to talk in public until she belted out a rendition of “Somewhere in Palo Alto” (in full Dorothy garb) at her preschool graduation, as much to her own surprise as anyone else's. Since then, she has performed professionally through middle school and high school with theaters on the East Coast and in the Bay Area, including Paper Mill Playhouse, Just Theater, Symmetry Theatre, Playwrights Foundation, Berkeley Playhouse, Custom Made Theater Co., PlayGround, and California Conservatory Theater. Alona has also worked as a teaching artist/assistant at ACT's Young Conservatory and Berkeley Playhouse's Summer/Winter Conservatory; this summer, she returns to Berkeley Playhouse as a Teaching Assistant and the Youth Coordinator of the mainstage production of Willy Wonka. Alona has also written several short plays: Parnassus, Disintegrating (2011 Still Waters Festival winner), Grey Waves (Honorable Mention, Berkeley Rep Teen One Acts 2011), and Act After Curtain, which was selected as a Young Playwrights Project finalist and performed as a curtain raiser for the Best of PlayGround 2011 Festival. Before heading to Harvard in the fall, Alona took a gap year to found Up Next, the Bay Area teen theater-going initiative, and feels incredibly lucky to have co-founded and taught at Little Opera, SF's all-kids opera company, with the inaugural class of some of the most inspirations 6-to-10-year-olds she has ever met.
