ABOUT US

Archipelago Theatre, Inc. was incorporated in May 1990 as a non profit professional theatre company. Co-Founders, Ellen Hemphill and Rafael Lopez Barrantes, former members of the Roy Hart Theatre, permanently moved the company from France to the United States in September 1990, where it found a home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and the greater Triangle arts community. Ellen Hemphill is now the Artistic and Managing Director.

BIOGRAPHIES

Ellen Hemphill
Artistic and Managing Director, Co-Founder
Ellen Hemphill is Artistic Director, Managing Director and co-Founder of Archipelago Theatre Company in Chapel Hill, NC. She has directed for Archipelago: The Woman in the Attic,And Mary Wept, A New Fine Shame, Snow, Amor Fortuna, Blue Roses, Eulogy for a Warrior, Ten-in One, Those Women, Landscape, Silence and Night, Binky Kite and the Oxymorons, The Abdication, and Escurial. Ellen is also a singer and performer and wrote and performed in the solos Another Time, Another Place...Someone Else, Cassandra's Lullaby, and She Didn't Like the Moon Without Clouds. She is a member of the faculty of Duke Theatre Studies Department since 1993 and directed their productions of: The Crucible The Trojan Women and Exit the King. Ellen also teaches Voice and Gesture with the American Dance Festival ('92) and is a long time member of the Roy Hart Theatre of France, where she worked and performed for 13 years. She is also a private consultant for professionals through Cardea Consulting. Ellen currently lives in Chapel Hill, N.C.

Nor Hall
Writer/Research
Nor Hall is a writer, archetypal thinker, psychotherapist in private practice and a theatre-collaborator. She has worked with Pantheatre (Paris) in the Myth & Theatre Festivals, Archipelago Theatre (Chapel Hill) and Shawn McConneloug’s Orchestra (Minneapolis) in the development of new pieces that give imaginal work a stage. She studied at Beloit College and UC Santa Cruz (PhD. in the History of Consciousness). Nor’s books include The Moon and the Virgin: Images of the Archetypal Feminine (Harper & Row), Broodmales (Spring), Those Women (Spring), Irons in the Fire (Barrytown Ltd.). Her articles appear in Spring: on the artist Jess and the poet Robert Duncan (Dreamway 59) and the "Architecture of Intimacy" (Marriages 60). She used to lecture for Jungian groups, art circles, myth forums, academic classes but is increasingly interested in performance & related issues of interdisciplinary collabortion. Hall lives with her family in the Twin Cities and on Bailey Island, Maine.

Jan Chambers
Set and Costume Design
Jan Chambers has served as resident set and costume designer for Archipelago Theatre since 1994 and counts her work with Ellen Hemphill and the Archipelago artists as among the most rewarding experiences of her career. Recent designs have also been seen in productions for Theater Or at the Victory Garden Theater in Chicago, Profile Theater Project in Portland, Oregon, and regionally at Manbites Dog Theater, Carolina Ballet, North Carolina Shakespeare Festival and Charlotte Repertory Theater.  In 2007 she joined the faculty of the Department of Dramatic Art at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill where she teaches theater design and technology and serves as a resident designer for UNC's professional theater, Playmakers Repertory Company. Previously she was the resident designer for Duke University's Department of Theater Studies, where her work included award winning sets and/or costumes for Trojan Women, Angels in America, and the premiere production of an adaptation of Don DeLilo's Mao II. She is also a sculptor and painter.  View her portfolio.

Allison Leyton-Brown is a professional musician, composer, arranger, and music director based in New York City.  She has composed more than thirty original music and sound scores for theatre, opera, dance & film productions across the U.S. and Canada.  Recent NYC projects include: The Theory of Kiss (York Theater); Sake With the Haiku Geisha (Gotham Stage Company); The Snow Queen (Urban Stages); and ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (Friendly Fire).  Her one-act opera Aloha Flight 243 (with librettist Sophia Chapadjiev) was produced by Lincoln Center’s Directors’ Lab and Nautilus Music-Theater in Minneapolis.  Allison is composer-in-residence with Archipelago Theater, for whom she wrote the score for The Woman in the Attic , and Out of the Blue (opens 2010) and in collaboration with Ellen Hemphill and the Duke Theatre Studies Department, The Trojan Women and Exit the King . Allison also works as a freelance composer for various television and film projects, including a silent short for Coca Cola, two festival feature films, and various television programs ( The Cooking Loft; Molly: An American Girl on the Homefront ).  Most recently she completed a score for the feature documentary Millions: A Lottery Story (Dir. Paul LaBlanc).  Allison is on the faculty of NYU’s Playwrights Horizons Theater School.  She has a Masters from Tisch School of the Arts’ Musical Theatre Writing Program and is a three-time ASCAP award recipient.

Archipelago does not discriminate in choosing artists from race, creed, gender, gender orientation, or with disabilities.