Steven R. Culp (Playwright) Born and raised in the mountains of Colorado, Stephen R. Culp received degrees in Directing and English Literature from Regis University. After moving to New York to attend the National Shakespeare Conservatory, he began writing plays between acting jobs. Other plays include: The 13 Hallucinations of Julio Rivera (which premiered at the Magic in 2004), Kitty, Let’s All Clap, Life on Pluto and Decadent Lawyers in Heat. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild.

Jimmy Bohr (Director) has also directed over 30 stage productions ranging from Off-Broadway to regional theatres, including The 13 Hallucinations of Julia Rivera by Steven R. Culp at the Magic. Previously, he was the casting director for As The World Turns (CBS), Another World (NBC), and the Assistant Casting Director for Guiding Light (CBS). He holds an MFA in Directing from Florida State University and a BA in Theatre from The Catholic University of America. He has taught at New York School of Film and Television and American Musical and Dramatic Academy. He iscurrently on the faculty of The Ohio State University Department of Theatre.

Kevin Day (Science Expert) spent his early years in Central California frequenting the Sierra Nevada, which cultivated a strong interest in the Earth Sciences. After graduating from Turlock High School, Kevin traveled East to upstate New York where he received a BA degree from Colgate University concentrating in Geology. As an undergraduate, he gained valuable field experience mapping in the Rocky Mountains and New England. The next few years were spent pursuing outdoor interests in northwestern Wyoming, then Kevin moved to Laramie to study

Hydrogeology at the University of Wyoming. Kevin's Master's work, entitled Aquifer Heterogeneity in Groundwater Flow Modeling, focused on developing code for a groundwater flow model to address contaminant issues in a fluvial aquifer system adjacent to an environmentally sensitive riparian corridor. After earning an MS in Geology from UW in 1999, Kevin began full time work in the fields of Water Resources and Environmental Geology, which continue to be his professional focus.

David Ford’s (Playwright) first play, Too Good to Be True, won 2nd place in South Coast Rep’s 6th Annual California Playwrights Competition.   His second play, The Interrogation of Nathan Hale, premiered at SCR and was published by Dramatic Publishing Company.  His third and fourth plays were commissioned by SCR and Phoenix Pictures (respectively) and have been read at the Mark Taper Forum, the Bay Area Playwright’s Festival, and Magic Theatre. Mr. Ford has been collaborating on new and unusual theatre for fifteen years. His collaboration with Brian Copeland, Not a Genuine Black Man, has been running for six months in San Francisco. Recent work has been with storyteller-holy-man Ron Jones and Michael Rice, a mentally disabled performer on Say Ray; and with Charlie Varon on Rush Limbaugh in Night School, Ten Day Soup, The People’s Violin, and his new CD: “Visiting Professor of Pessimism”. As a director, Mr. Ford has worked regionally at the Public Theatre, Second Stage, St. Clement’s, Dixon’s Place, One Dream Theatre, and Theatre for the New City (NY), Highways (LA) and Woolly Mammoth (Washington, DC) as well as at theatres around the Bay Area including Magic Theatre and Marin Theatre Company. Mr. Ford also teaches Creating and Performing Your Own Work at The Marsh and has taught playwriting at Stanford University and San Francisco State. He is a Resident Artist at the Marsh.

Dr. Brandy Matthews (Science Expert) received her MD from Indiana University. She then completed an internship at Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis and trained in neurology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. There she served as Chief Resident and Clinical Instructor at the Mayo College of Medicine.

Dr. Matthews completed her Behavioral Neurology fellowship training at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center in 2007 and is currently a Clinical Instructor in the UCSF Department of Neurology. Dr. Matthews participates in the evaluation and management of patients at the Memory and Aging Center clinic and multiple outreach sites serving the San Francisco Chinese community. She acts as Director of Outreach and Co-Director of Education for the UCSF Alzheimer's Disease Research Center and oversees neuropsychiatry rotations for neurology residents, psychiatry interns, geriatrics fellows, medical genetics fellows, and senior medical students.

Her research focuses on the social and emotional interactions of patients with dementia, with a particular emphasis on the emotional response to sound. Her current project, funded by the GRAMMY FoundationR, seeks to characterize the emotional response to music in patients with neurodegenerative diseases. Dr. Matthews also maintains an interest in the representation of neurological conditions in works of art, from opera to Shakespeare to modern literature and film. 

Ira Hauptman’s (Playwright) plays have been performed throughout the United States, as well as in Paris, Brussels and Bangalore. Starry Messenger is his second play to be developed through the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Project. The first, Partition, is about the early twentieth century mathematicians Ramanujan and Hardy. It was presented by the Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York as a staged reading in FirstLight 2002, and then seen at the San Francisco Exploratorium in a staged reading co-produced by the Magic Theatre and Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company. Its premiere took place at the Aurora in 2003 with Barbara Oliver directing. Mr. Hauptman's plays have been performed in New York at the Manhattan Theatre Club and in Los Angeles at the Audrey Skirball-Kenis Theatre, FirstStage, Odyssey and Moving Arts. He has also written criticism for Partisan Review and The New Republic. He is a graduate of Yale Drama School and teaches at Queens College.