Shanga Parker, actor, director, and NYU and Columbia faculty member, and Jaclyn Backhaus, playwright, screenwriter, and teacher, will join The Actors Center’s Resident Company this spring for a series of artist development workshops focused on movement and writing.
Shanga Parker trained as an actor, learned directing, and has taught all kinds of acting. He acts professionally for television, film and theatre. He is an Arts Professor at NYU and Director of the Tisch Summer High School Program. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Columbia MFA Acting Program and at the Iceland University of the Arts. He is a member of SAG/AFTRA and AEA. He has an undergraduate degree from Brown University and an M.F.A. in Acting from UC San Diego.
Jaclyn Backhaus is a playwright, educator, arts facilitator, and mother. Her plays include Wives (Playwrights Horizons), India Pale Ale (2018 Horton Foote Prize, Manhattan Theatre Club), and Men On Boats (Clubbed Thumb, Playwrights Horizons). She is one of five Creative Directors of of the process-based arts facilitation group Fresh Ground Pepper, and she is one of the fourteen members of the current cohort of The Kilroys, a bicoastal collective that celebrates women, trans, and nonbinary presence in the American theater landscape. She is a Lincoln Center Playwright-in-Residence, and she was once a 2016 Tow Playwright Resident with Clubbed Thumb. She got a BFA from NYU, where she now teaches some skillsets of playwriting to brilliant students. Her screenplay Preeti Popped It was part of 1497’s annual South Asian Screenwriters Lab, and she is currently in development on several projects for TV. She resides in Ridgewood, Queens, with her husband Andrew J. Scoville, a theater director, and their son Ernie. You can learn more about her work at jaclynbackhaus.comÂ
