carthage verbatim theatre

Nora Carroll (Kenosha Verbatim Project)

Nora Carroll is a theater artist/educator who believes in the transformative power of storytelling. Before receiving her MFA from the University of San Diego, she attended New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Nora has had the pleasure of storytelling in a variety of diverse spaces, including: Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, The Old Globe, The Public Theatre, Centinela Prison in San Diego, Metropolitan Detention Center in New York, and Armory Women’s Shelter in Manhattan. Nora is invested in creating artistic spaces that are transformative, gender expansive, and equitable. 

Contact: noracarroll2@gmail.com

Dr. Rebecca Hornung (Fighting For Home)

Dr. Hornung was a practicing social worker for 15 years and worked with veterans and their families with a focus on helping them readjust to civilian life. She is now a faculty member and chair in the Department of Social Work at Carthage College. She previously collaborated with Professor McClendon on the play "Fighting For Home: Stories of Women Who Serve."

Her teaching focuses on social justice, equity and our collective power to influence social change. Her courses on leadership, ethics, human behavior, and working with multicultural families in urban schools, examine how stressors like trauma, poverty and oppression affect human functioning and the ways in which structural inequality and discrimination impact our human potential individually and collectively. Dr. Hornung uses a liberation approach in her teaching; challenging students to stand in their power by identifying leadership opportunities in their “spheres of influence” and encouraging them to develop their own specific roles in advancing social change toward a more just society. 

Contact: rhornung@carthage.edu 

Martin McClendon

Professor McClendon has worked at Carthage full-time since 2006, directing plays and teaching acting, design, voice for the stage, and verbatim theatre.  Since 2015, Martin has been teaching and using verbatim techniques to collaborate with students and other faculty to tell unheard stories.  These efforts began with military veterans, resulting in the plays Afghanistan/Wisconsin (student written 2015), Welcome Back? (2019), Voices of VOW (student written 2019) and Fighting For Home: Stories of Women Who Serve (2020).

Since 2022 Martin has taught a dedicated verbatim playwriting class.  That year the class created Frontline, about healthcare workers in the pandemic.  A collaboration with fellow professor Nora Carroll and two students led to The Kenosha Verbatim Project in 2023, with support from a Carthage summer research grant.  KVP participated in the "World Premiere Wisconsin" festival and was awarded the Rosa Parks Playwriting Award for 2024 by the Kennedy Center/American College Theatre Festival.

Previous to his work at Carthage, Martin was a professional actor and scene designer for 12 years, working in Los Angeles, Chicago, and around the midwest.

Contact: mmcclendon@carthage.edu 

Michael Cotey (Terminal Exhale)

Michael Cotey is the Joaquin Oliver Artistic Producer of ENOUGH! Plays to End Gun Violence, a ground-breaking campaign of theater activism for teens to confront the issue gun violence by writing original short plays on the topic and staging readings of those plays in theatres across the country. Readings of ENOUGH! have taken place in over a hundred locations since 2020, including flagship productions at The Kennedy Center and Lincoln Center. The work of ENOUGH! has been featured on PBS NewsHour, NPR, and the BBC, and was awarded the Golding Foundation Exemplary Project Award.

In addition to generating new plays about gun violence written by teens, Michael and ENOUGH! has collaborated with gun violence prevention activist Manuel Oliver to develop his solo theater piece GUAC: The One Man Show, about his relationship with his son Joaquin, who was one of the victims of the Marjory Stoneman Douglass mass shooting.

Michael has directed at Illinois Shakespeare Festival, Milwaukee Chamber Theatre, Next Act, Nebraska Repertory Theater, First Stage, Northwestern University, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Illinois Wesleyan University and Youngblood Theatre. He has also assisted at Goodman Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Utah Shakespeare, Steppenwolf, and Milwaukee Rep, for prominent directors, like Tony Award-winners Mary Zimmerman and Robert Falls. 

In 2023 he served as the Festival Producer for World Premiere Wisconsin, an inagural and first-of-its-kind statewide new play festival. From 2009-2013 he was the Founding Artistic Director of Youngblood Theatre, regularly celebrated by the theater community and the press as one of the most exciting new Milwaukee theater ventures in decades. 

Michael graduated from UW-Milwaukee with a BFA in Acting and from Northwestern University with an MFA in Directing. In 2014 he was named UWM’s “Graduate of the Last Decade.”