AARTWORKS: Since 1969, as a performer, writer, actor, director, and producer I have been intimately involved in the creation of a wide range of original performance work, ranging from original plays and musicals to "Whoopi Goldberg on Broadway" to market-place performances in Southern Ethiopia. I write and direct plays, musicals, sound-pieces, street performances, radio pieces and solo works. My opera, TOKENS: a Play on the Plague  won 4 Hollywood Dramalogue and Bay Area Critic's Awards. I have developed works for theaters in Germany and France, have toured Europe and Canada as a director and performer, and have performed my solo work MYethiOPIA in California, Chicago and Vermont. My solo piece Out Comes Butch has been revived in New Orleans and Santa Fe. Meanwhile the AIDS Education Circus I founded in Ethiopia has made its third national tour. My passion is to create new work - and I've collaborated with people at all levels of show-biz, Broadway, the "avant-garde" and community arts for that to happen. Currrently I am performing my solo show "Out Comes Butch" and a new piece: "Infarcation,"  another solo, "MYethiOPIA" and "Queen City Songs," which I sing with a piano.

   ARTS MANAGEMENT: I cofounded my first theater company in 1969 - the Growtofski-based Iowa Theatre Lab, and in 1973 with Bob Ernst and John O'Keefe in Berkeley cofounded the Blake St. Hawkeyes, incorporating as a 501(c3) and forming a Board. In my 12 years with the self-managing Hawkeyes my management responsibilities included book-keeping, grant-writing, publicity and booking. I served as Artistic and Executive Director of Free Street Programs from 1991-2003, seeing it through two economic downturns as it focused programming toward inner city youth. My prime responsibilities were fund-raising, grant-writing, business, staff and program management. In 2002 I cofounded the Awassa Children's Center an arts-based orphanage and vocational training center in Ethiopia and the Awassa AIDS Education Circus - now known throughout Ethiopia as the One Love HIV/AIDS Education Circus.  I am still very active as a fund-raiser for both organizations. In 2003 I became the Executive Director of three affiliated 501(c3) s, The Arts Council for Chautauqua County, The Reg Lenna Civic Center, and the Civic Center Development Corporation.  Scope of management ranges from real estate development and theater management to developing and funding a wide variety of arts-based programs for a county of 130,000 people. .............................................