Charlie Oates, director, movement coach and educator, and Justine Williams, actor-creator, director, and Yale faculty, will join The Actors Center’s Resident Company in March 2023 for a series of artist development workshops focused on creativity, physical performance, and games.
Justine Wolf Williams is an actor-creator, director and educator working across performance and film. Through her creative work, she seeks to evoke (and invoke) a sense of playfulness, pathos and poetic possibility. Her performance work has been developed/presented at venues ranging from seedy backroom bars to NY’s snazziest stages and artistic institutions, and her cinematic work has premiered at New Directors | New Films, Woodstock Film Festival, Maryland Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, and more.
Since 2013, she’s been on faculty at the David Geffen School of Drama (YSD) where she teaches play, creative process and collaborative strategies, and facilitates the development of new plays. She runs a thriving coaching practice, and makes her home between Brooklyn and Paris.
For nearly 40 years Charlie Oates taught in actor training programs and universities focusing on the physical training of actors. The majority of his career was spent at the University of California, San Diego where he served for several years as department chair and received the Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award in 2016.
As a movement coach and fight choreographer, Oates has worked at numerous theaters including La Jolla Playhouse, The Mixed Blood, The Old Globe, Cincinnati Playhouse, San Diego Rep, Chautauqua Theatre Company and the Denver Center Theatre Company. He has been a guest artist in leading actor training programs in the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Senegal, Sweden, and China. His years as a creator and performer of original physical theatre works, director and street performer have taken him across North America, the Pacific and Europe. His original work includes Truck Dog  (with James Donlon), which toured the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Ireland and with Czech Performers, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic; Staying Married (with Moira Keefe) which played throughout the U.S., Canada, New Zealand and Ireland and his solo work Man Overboard, also seen internationally.
He has directed over 50 productions at theatres, MFA programs and universities including, Flush at Theatre Alfred in Prague,  Save You, Hate Me in Berlin and Fuatia’s Future for the Calico Young People’s Theatre of New Zealand, Fool for Love at Chalk Rep in Los Angeles, nine productions at Creede Repertory Theatre and Where I Live and Fresh Paine at the Denver Center Theatre Company. Most recently, he co-created and directed Morph Masters, a new work focusing on the intersection of art and disability for Phamaly Theatre Company in Denver.
