Regina Ress

Regina Ress is an award winning storyteller, actor and educator, who has performed and taught for over thirty-five years from Broadway to Brazil in English and Spanish in a wide variety of settings from grade schools to senior centers, from homeless shelters and prisons to Lincoln Center and The White House.

Life and career

A native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Regina Ress holds a BS in English from Carnegie Mellon University, M.A. in Theatre from Villanova University, Certificate in TESOL from The New School. She has a son, Ari Ress, who is a photographer and graphic artist in New York City.

Ress is an award winning storyteller, actor, teaching artist, and educator who has brought storytelling to students, teachers, after-school staff, and parents in New York City, across the US, Central and South America and Europe. She has told stories professionally across the US in theatres, museums, libraries, schools, universities, parks and festivals. She has been a featured teller in the Hans Christian Andersen storytelling series in New York's Central Park for more than fifteen years. Other NYC appearances include The American Museum of Natural History, The Brooklyn Museum, and The New York Botanical Garden. In 2000, she told The Tale of Peter Rabbit for the Easter Egg Roll at The White House. She tells a wide variety of stories: folk tales, mythology, literary and original stories. Ms. Ress has performed and given workshops in Spanish in schools and international festivals in Costa Rica, Peru, Brazil and Spain.

As an actor, she appeared on Broadway in the all-star revival of The Women. Off-Broadway credits include La Mama, the Manhattan Theatre Club, and Theatre for the New City. She has toured with Mickey Rooney, Patrice Munsel, and Dan Dailey. As a founding member of the Caldwell Theatre Company in Boca Raton, Florida she played such roles as Maxine in Tennessee Williams' “The Night of the Iguana”, Prossie in George Bernard Shaw's “Candida,” and Nellie in the Rogers and Hammerstein musical “South Pacific” and was nominated three times for a South Florida Theatre and Arts Honors-The Carbonell Award.

Ress teaches a graduate course on storytelling for New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Developement, Program in Educational Theatre and produces the storytelling series at the historic Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village which features national and international storytellers. As well, she is a certified ESL instructor who teaches English for the adult education program at Northern Manhattan Improvement Corporation (NMIC) in New York City and is the recipient of a 2004 National Storytelling Network grant for her project Voices from Washington Heights: Immigrants Tell Stories About and From Their Homelands. As a teaching artist, she has given numerous workshops in New York, New Jersey, and Florida schools, K-12. She has also led after school workshops for CAYR (Creative Alternatives for Youth at Risk) through Arts Horizons in Newark, New Jersey and a weekly workshop for teens at a JINS shelter in Cape May County, New Jersey. She has performed and co-led workshops at York Women's Correctional Institution, CT, and Baylor Women's Correctional Institution, DE with the Avodah Dance Ensemble and brought a storytelling program to the women in Bedford Hills Women's Correctional Institute in Westchester County, NY. In the aftermath of 9/11, under the auspices of Mercy Corps, she facilitated workshops for adults on the issue of children and trauma. After the massive tsunami in December 2004, she helped create StoryTsunami, an international series of storytelling benefits for relief and she produced a StoryTsunami benefit at The Provincetown Playhouse in New York City.

Ress has been a board member of the NY Storytelling Center for over a decade, and is the NY Metro Liaison to the National Storytelling Network which, in 2003 awarded her an Oracle Award in Regional Leadership and Service. She has published numerous articles, including: "Once Upon a Time… In the Language Classroom" in Tantagora Magazine, 2007; "Love at First Sight" for Parabola Magazine, 2005; "The Holocaust, Littleton, and Our Children" for Storytelling Magazine, 1999; "A Matter of Cultural Survival" in Storytelling Magazine, 1997; "A Storyteller Tells Her Story", Carnegie Mellon Magazine 1994;, and "Inanna as a Woman of Power" in The Quest Quarterly Journal 1990.

External links

* [http://www.rnrproductions-nyc.com/Regina Website]
* [http://www.storynet.org/Programs/Directory/view.php?id=14602 National Storytelling Network: Regina Ress]
* [http://www.storytelling-nyc.org/ New York Storytelling Center]
* [http://www.nmic.org Northern Manhattan Improvement Corporation]