Michael Prichard, Tiara Staples, Chason Marvin and Tara Little celebrate their honors at the 2024 Region IV Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival in Albany Georgia. (Photo courtesy of Theatre AUM)
By: Kniya Potts
Four talented AUM theatere students and theatere professor Neil David Seibel recently attended the Kennedy Center American College Festival in Albany, with Georgia taking home top regional honors.
Students Tiara Staples, Chason Marvin, and Tara Little had all received awards while attending. “The Region 4 Festival was a great opportunity for our nominees from AUM,” said Neil David Siebel. “It’s always eye-opening for our students from so many other universities, and these are the best from each school,” added Seibel.
Tiara Staples won first place in the Directing Initiative of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society. Every April, a single student director gets chosen as a Regional Finalist from among the eight regions, and they will have the opportunity to take advantage of the national festival held at the Kennedy Center, in Washington D.C. Staples was additionally granted reimbursement for her travel, accommodation, and daily expenses in addition to seminars and performances at the KCACTF National Festival. Staples will also get an Associate Membership in SDC for a year.
Tara Little and Michael Pritchard were both AUM student actors in the scene that Staples directed. “Tara, Tiara, Michael and Chason all represented AUM very well in their categories and I’m proud of their accomplishments at Region 4,” said Seibel. “I’m absolutely delighted that we have two students who will be competing at the National Festival in Washington D.C. Those scholarship awards are significant, impressive and as you can imagine, even more competitive,” Seibel added.
Chason Marvin, who is graduating in May, also took top spot at winning first place. Established to help raise the standard of critiques, journalism/reporting, and campaigning, the Institute for Theatre Journalism and Advocacy gives writers the chance to develop at the exact same level as the artists that they critique, rejoice, and understand. Upon evaluating the work they produced during their regional festival, four of the eight regional ITJA recipients will be selected at the end of all eight regional festivals to Washington, D.C. His podcast “What We Share” was published on the KCAC website and also can be found on Spotify.
Tara Little was First Runner Up for the KCACTF/LORT ASPIRE Leadership Fellows Program. This program develops the next wave of creative and managerial professionals for the American theater.
Additionally, students took part in activities related to performance, design and production management. In addition to presenting their studies and artistic endeavors, they had the opportunity to establish connections with other students and visiting artists, participate in roundtable discussions, shows, showcases, new play observations, workshops across each discipline, audition and interview.
“The vetting system is achieved by outside respondents watching campus productions and deciding who, if any, students have earned a nomination to compete for scholarship awards,” said Seibel. Seibel then added, “This year I felt pretty confident with the group we were taking, but I also know how challenging each competition is, especially when we have students who have been nominated in multiple categories or are supporting someone else’s work with their own.”
Michael Krek was asked to give a jury-led conference lecture titled “The Sustainable Set,” and Neil David Seibel took involvement in the recruitment fair, transfer student castings and auditions, interviews, along with mentoring those students.