Jack is an Oakland based producer and designer. He’s the Director of Production for ODC and the Production Manager for the Sun Valley Music Festival in Idaho. He’s toured nationally and internationally with Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, Van Anh Vo, and Flyaway Productions among many others, and is thrilled to have been a part of bringing The Forgotten Empress to Pakistan in 2017. Jack is honored to have received a 2019 Isadora Duncan Dance Award for Outstanding Achievement in Visual Design for Flyaway’s The Wait Room. Most recently Jack produced the feature opera film Goodbye, Mr Chips. www.jackb.info

Mr. Davel is a percussionist who combines his classical training with intimate knowledge and use of electronic music resources. Davel’s diverse career and influences range from traditional acoustic folk and classical music to the highly experimental. Davel has been a member of the Paul Dresher Ensemble’s Electro-Acoustic Band since 1999 and his also works with Dresher as part of the Dresher-Davel Invented Instrument Duo and Double Duo (a quartet).  Other notable close collaborators include Amy X Neuburg, Jack West, John Duykers, Guillermo Galindo, and Vân-Ánh Võ. He has composed and performed live for several dNaga dance productions and appeared in theater productions for The California Shakespeare Theater, West Edge Opera, and South Coast Repertory. As a mentee of electronic music pioneer Don Buchla for over 20 years, he continues the design of electronic music instruments, including continued refinement of the Buchla Marimba Lumina — Davel’s signature instrument. Davel holds a Bachelor of Music from Northern Illinois University and MFA from Mills College.

Mary is an award-winning costume designer and small business leader in the commercial photography industry. She has worked as a costume designer in the Bay Area since 2001 and her costuming has been presented at Carnegie Hall, toured internationally, and was featured on the cover of the New York Times, among other publications. She has collaborated with a number of dance companies (including ODC, Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, Liss Fain Dance, RAWdance, and Robert Moses' Kin, among others), as well as numerous theater and opera companies. Her collaborations with photographer RJ Muna have won recognition from American Photographic Artists and Graphis publications. Mary received a BFA in apparel design from the Rhode Island School of Design and additionally has spent years as a set tailor for clients that ranged from Vogue to Vanity Fair. In 2014, she founded a unique family of companies that serve the commercial photography industry: LuLu Artists Collective & Blackbird Tailors, representation agencies for production artists and tailors; BULA Billing, which provides accounts payables and fiduciary services; and OOTB Solutions, a production payroll company. Nicknamed "Miracle Mary" early in her career for her skill at pulling off the seemingly impossible, Mary continues to create and evoke the unimaginable through her costume designs and business ventures.

Paul Dresher is an internationally active composer noted for his ability to integrate diverse musical
influences into his own coherent style. He pursues many forms of musical expression including experimental opera/music theater, chamber and orchestral composition, live instrumental electro-acoustic music, musical instrument invention, and scores for theater and dance. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Composition in 2006-07, he has received commissions from the Library of Congress, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Spoleto Festival USA, Kronos Quartet, San Francisco Symphony, Zeitgeist, San Francisco Ballet, Seattle Chamber Players, Present Music, Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, Brenda Way/ODC Dance and Chamber Music America. He has performed or had his works performed throughout the world at venues including the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Festival d ’Automne in Paris, the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, and the Minnesota Opera. Recent works include Breathing at the Boundaries (2020), Trace Figures (2019); Crazy Eights &Fractured Symmetries, commissioned and premiered by the Berkeley Symphony in 2016, Family Matters (2014) - a duo for TwoSense - cellist Ashley Bathgate and pianist Lisa Moore, Concerto for Quadrachord & Orchestra for the Berkeley Symphony, and Two Entwined (2011) - commissioned by pianist Sarah Cahill and premiered at the Spoleto Festival USA. In 2015, Dresher entered an entirely new arena with Sound Maze, a hands-on installation of his large-scale invented musical instruments created in collaboration with Daniel Schmidt. Sound Maze, has been presented at OZ in Nashville, the Esplanade Theater in Singapore, Fort Mason in San Francisco, the Mondavi Center at UC Davis, the Napa Valley Museum, USC’s Fisher Museum, UNC Chapel Hill’s CURRENT ArtSpace + Studio and at The Doseum in San Antonio. In the fall of 2022, it will travel to the Brooklyn Children’s Museum.

Rinde Eckert is a writer, composer, singer, actor, and director whose theater, music theater, and dance theater pieces have been performed throughout the United States and abroad. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Music Composition, a Marc Blitzstein Award (from The American Academy of Arts and Letters), an Obie Award (And God Created Great Whales), a Grammy Award (Lonely Motel), an Alpert Award for Drama (2009), and a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award (2012).  He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 2007 for his Orpheus X. In 2014 he made his debut as principal soloist with the New York Philharmonic in Steven Mackey’s oratorio Dreamhouse, with whom he co-wrote the libretto. In addition to three opera librettos written for composer Paul Dresher (Slow Fire, being the most extensively toured), Eckert has also written and directed two of Paul’s staged works for instrumentalists:  Sound Stage (with Zeitgeist) and Schick Machine (with Steven Schick). Rinde wrote the libretto for and sings the lead role in Aging Magician with music by Paola Prestini, (just given its west coast premiere at San Diego Opera).  In 2019 he toured with the Kronos Quartet in My Lai, by composer Jonathan Berger, a mono opera for him and multi-instrumentalist Van Ahn Vo. Rinde has collaborated with Margaret Jenkins and The Margaret Jenkins Dance Co. on many pieces, among them Shelf Life, Woman/Window/Square, Breathing at the Boundaries and two solos (music and/or text): Steps Midway and Wasn’t it This. He and Margaret have also created and performed four duets: Shorebirds Atlantic, and so they…, Shadows and Water, and the recent Migratory Passages for ODC’s online Theater Festival.

Born and raised on the east coast, Andrea Hicks studied dance with Valerie Bettis, Ernie Pagnano, and with various teachers at the Cunningham Studio in New York City.  After graduating from New York University where she received a BA in Art History, Andrea moved to Philadelphia where she was a member of Group Motion Media Theatre.  In 1972 Andrea moved to San Francisco to study with Margaret Jenkins.  She was a member of the MJDC from 1975 – 1982; taught at the MJDC studio; was an administrator of the children’s program and taught in the children’s program with Crystal Samuels.  She created her own works and collaborated with members of MJDC.  She and Colleen Mulvihill collaborated with ROVA Saxophone Quartet and J.E. Deane.  With poet Aaron Shurin, she co-directed and choreographed his play Line Drawing with Silvana Nova. In 1982 Andrea returned to the east coast and family and continued to dance, perform, and make Super 8 performance films, including for Colleen (Erector Set I, music by J.A. Deane and Butch Morris), Susan Welti (Streams Can Be Crossed, performed, and shown at PS 122), and Mercy Sidbury (A Dilemma of a Small Nature, music by Patsy Kline and narrated by Mercy Sidbury).  After a long career in law firms, Andrea recently retired and is volunteering at the Greenpoint Brooklyn Public Library helping children K-8 with homework. She is also studying ESL with the Attleboro, Massachusetts Literacy Center.  Andrea is married to Marcial Garlitos and has one son, Zack, a photographer. Andrea is happy to be back in SF with Margy and with so many colleagues/dancers/friends and happy to use her lifelong interest in photography to collaborate with others to illustrate Margy’s lifetime of dance and choreography and her vast, glorious work.

Virginia Matthews has had a 50 year career as a dancer, choreographer and teacher.  She began her dance career at Sarah Lawrence College under the mentorship of Bessie Schoenberg and trained at the Merce Cunningham Studio in N.Y.C.  In 1973 she became a founding member of The Margaret Jenkins Dance Co. in San Francisco, serving as school director and teacher at the Jenkins Studio.  Her professional career has included co-artistic director of Dances for 1 and 2, directing her own company from 1983-88 and co-founding SoCo Dance Theater.  She continues to perform, choreograph and teach throughout the Bay Area.  Her recent solo retrospective, Approaching 70 - 50 years of a Life in Dance won a 2018-19 Izzie award.  As a member of the greater Bay Area dance community, she served on The Board of Directors of the original service agency, the Bay Area Dance Coalition and on the Isadora Duncan Dance Award Committee, serving 2 terms as chairperson.

Poet and translator Michael Palmer has lived in San Francisco since 1969. He has worked with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company since its inception and has collaborated with many visual artists and composers. His most recent collections are Little Elegies for Sister Satan (New Directions, 2021), The Laughter of the Sphinx, (New Directions, 2016), Madman With Broom (selected poems, with Chinese translations by Yunte Huang, Oxford University Press, 2011) and Thread (New Directions 2011). Among his awards, Palmer has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila Wallace – Reader’s Digest Fund Writer’s Award, two National Endowment for the Arts grants in poetry, the Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, and in 2006, the Wallace Stevens Prize from the Academy of American Poets.  In June of 2012 he received the Arts and Letters Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has taught at various universities in the United States, Europe and Asia, and his writings have been translated into more than thirty languages.