Maribel Alvarez, Ph.D., is an anthropologist, folklorist, writer, and curator. She holds the Jim Griffith Chair in Public Folklore at the Southwest Center, University of Arizona, and is the founder of the Southwest Folklife Alliance. In 2018, the American Folklore Society awarded her the prestigious Americo Paredes Prize for “excellence in integrating scholarship and engagement with the people and communities one studies.”

Dee Davis is president of the Center for Rural Strategies, which publishes the Daily Yonder and manages the Rural Assembly. Dee serves on the boards of the Fund for Innovative TV, the Institute for Work and the Economy, the East Kentucky Leadership Foundation, the publication Southerly, the Feral Arts of Queensland, Australia, and on the Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship. He lives in Whitesburg, Kentucky.

Recent project: Film, East Kentucky Flood

Alex S. Jones was born and raised in east Tennessee. He won a Pulitzer Prize at The New York Times for his coverage of news media and was the founding host of NPR’s On the Media. He served as director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is coauthor of two acclaimed biographies of newspaper families and author of Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy.

Arnaldo J. López is a cultural worker with a Ph.D. in Latin/o American Literatures and Cultures from New York University. He first joined Pregones Theater when the company set out to transform a South Bronx warehouse into a vibrant performing arts center, and later helped engineer a merger with the historic Puerto Rican Traveling Theater in Manhattan. Versed in a broad set of creative, community, and nonprofit topics, he works with artists in mapping paths toward joyful and sustainable practice. His background also includes ten years in letterpress and graphic design.

Tushar Mathew is a theater maker, actor, and teaching artist. He is cofounder of the Otherland Theatre Ensemble, a physical theater devising company that tells stories of underdogs and outcasts who inhabit outrageous worlds and are moved by universal struggles. Tushar is currently based in the city of Bengaluru, India. He is visiting faculty member at the Drama School Mumbai, and, as a facilitator for the nonprofit Paani Foundation, teaches seventh and eighth graders about climate change and conservation.

The Reverend Preston Mitchell is a retired educator who served as a deacon in the Episcopal Church from 2013 to 2020. He remains involved with the Rideshare program, which was suspended during the pandemic but anticipates returning to serve the families of people incarcerated in southwest Virginia prisons.

Anne Shelby is the author of poems, essays, and children’s books, including Homeplace, a School Library Journal Best Book; The Adventures of Molly Whuppie and Other Appalachian Folktales, an American Folklore Society Aesop Accolade winner; and The Man Who Lived in a Hollow Tree, an eastern Kentucky legend passed down in her family. Her plays include The Lone Pilgrim, a one-woman show about Aunt Molly Jackson; Shaping Clay, a series of outdoor dramas based on local history; and, with Bob Martin, the HomeSong trilogy of community plays. She lives at Teges, Kentucky, in Clay County.

A. B. Spellman is a poet and essayist. He has written extensively on jazz. For thirty years he worked at the National Endowment for the Arts; for about half that time, he was director of the Expansion Arts Program, and the other half he was deputy chairman.

Recent event: Keynote address at Harlem Stage, Thursday, May 18, 2023, BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT: THEN AND NOW CONFERENCE DAY 1

Eugene Wolf is an actor/singer/storyteller who was born and raised in Greeneville, Tennessee. For sixteen years he was a member of Johnson City, Tennessee’s Road Company, which was the first U.S. theater to perform in the former Soviet satellite Bashkiria. In 2013 in Rybinsk, Russia, Eugene recorded Where We’ll Never Grow Old, an album of American spirituals. Since 1997, he has been a member of Barter Theatre’s acting company, where he created the role of A. P. Carter in Keep on the Sunny Side. He is half of the country singing duo the Brother Boys, now celebrating their thirty-sixth year together.

Recent Project: Keep on the Sunny Side is being performed April 22nd – May 20th 2023 at the Barter Theater in Abingdon, Virginia

Ben Fink has worked with the Roadside ensemble since 2015, as a member of the Betsy! Scholars’ Circle, as the founding organizer of the Letcher County Culture Hub and the Performing Our Future coalition, and as the cofounder of the cross-partisan dialogue project Hands Across the Hills. He has also served as dramaturg on the German premieres of two Broadway musicals, made theater with Turkish and Arab high school students, and chaired a Lutheran faith community in Minnesota. His work in theater, organizing, pedagogy, and economic development has been featured by Salon.com, the Brookings Institution, TDR/The Drama Review, Harvard Law School, Americans for the Arts, PolicyLink, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2020, Ben was recognized by Time magazine as one of “27 People Bridging Divides Across America.”

Donna Porterfield was managing director of Roadside Theater from 1979 to 2019, with oversight responsibility for all of the theater’s personnel and financial matters. She was elected to six terms as chair of the Appalshop board of directors. Her playwriting credits include Thousand Kites, Voices from the Battlefront, Junebug/Jack, and Corn Mountain/Pine Mountain: Following the Seasons. She conducted dozens of cultural development residencies in communities across the country and served as a policy adviser for federal and state arts agencies. Born in Berkeley County, West Virginia on a small family farm, she grew up surrounded by extended family, music, and storytelling, until her family moved to northern Virginia for work. Before joining Roadside, she was a respiratory therapist and a first-grade teacher. Since her retirement, she has remained active in her church and her Norton, Virginia, community.

Dudley Cocke was director of Roadside Theater from 1978 to 2018, and from 2012 to 2014 he simultaneously served as acting director of the Appalachian arts and humanities center Appalshop, of which Roadside is one part. Under his direction, the ensemble performed and conducted residencies in forty-nine states, with extended runs Off-Broadway, and represented the United States at international festivals across Europe. In addition to his primary responsibilities at Roadside, which included stage directing and playwriting, he was involved in a full range of nonprofit arts activity: His essays on arts and culture policy have been published nationally and internationally, he cofounded two national multicultural arts coalitions, he served on the boards of three private philanthropic foundations, and he was regularly tapped to advise the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. In 2002, he received the Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities.

Ron Short joined Roadside Theater in 1979 as a playwright, composer, musician, and performer. As the ensemble’s leading playwright, he wrote and performed in more than a dozen main-stage Roadside plays, all of which toured nationally. There have been two major recordings of his music, and his original composition for orchestra premiered at the University of Virginia at Wise, his alma mater. He was the ensemble’s lighting designer and conducted scores of multiyear artistic residencies in communities and universities. He was raised on a hillside farm in Dickenson County, Virginia, and has carried on his family’s gospel singing tradition, which dates back to the 1800s. He lives on the side of a mountain in Duffield, Virginia, with his wife, Joan Boyd Short, and he plays in his “hobby band,” Ron Short and the Possum Playboys.