Current Board of Directors and Officers
Gordon L. Gidlund
Acting President; Director of Lectures; Playwright of Mock Trials
A retired attorney with the IRS Office of Chief Counsel for 35 years and previously an adjunct professor at the University of San Diego School of Law for 17 years, Mr. Gidlund is naturally concerned with the intersection of the Bard and the law. Inspired by the efforts of Justice Anthony Kennedy, he has written four mock trial scripts subjecting Shakespearean characters to forensic examination. He is an Oxfordian and a signatory of the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt. In his youth, he taught English as a Peace Corps Volunteer in South Korea. He has a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and a J.D. from the University of Minnesota.
John Tessmer
Artistic Director
John is a professional actor and director, who holds a B.A. from Yale and an M.F.A. in Acting from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He spent six seasons with the Colorado Shakespeare Festival between graduate school and moving back to his home town of San Diego in 2001. John co-founded the La Jolla Theatre Ensemble in 2010 and is the company’s Producing Artistic Director. Regionally and locally, he has performed on many stages. John is an Associate Artist of New Fortune Theatre Company. He has taught for the University of Colorado and the Old Globe Theatre and acted in two-thirds of the Shakespearean canon.
Patricia Elmore Costa
Director of Programming
Patricia is the founder and Artistic Director of the San Diego Actors Theatre now celebrating 34 years of presenting professional, provocative and innovative theatre. Patricia is a professional actor, director, producer, writer and educator of theatre and communication arts. She has directed and acted in projects in San Diego: the Old Globe Theatre, San Diego Repertory Theatre, San Diego Museum of Art, North Coast Repertory Theatre, Playwrights Project, 6 th @ Penn Theatre, Diversionary Theatre, Eveoke Theatre, and San Diego Actors Theatre. She created, directed, and performed in five different popular Shakespeare programs for SD City and County Gate programs. Patricia created the Sunday Salon of staged readings and other theatre projects at the La Jolla Riford Library. Recently, she directed a critically acclaimed site-specific production of The Zoo Story.
Nathan Agin
Director of Online Marketing; Financial Manager
Nathan Agin is an audiobook narrator, online marketer/web designer, text coach, and podcast host of The Working Actor’s Journey. Nathan attended USC’s School of Dramatic Arts and trained in classical theatre with The Antaeus Company. He relocated to San Diego after four years in Hyde Park, Chicago and was fairly nomadic before that. He also volunteers in SD with Bridge Hospice, visiting patients and singing songs on the ukulele. Learn more about him and all his projects here.
Cassidy Bartolomei
Director of Art & Awareness
Cassidy believes that Shakespeare’s works and the communities that continue in his tradition are of immeasurable worth. She owns a full-service marketing firm, Cardinal Red, which specializes in digital advertising and brand building. Cassidy received her BA from the University of Notre Dame.
Paul Majkut
Paul has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in Shakespeare, Elizabethan-Jacobean drama, and the poetry of the English renaissance and 17th century in his career as a university teacher. He has been awarded two National Endowment for the Humanities grants (Cambridge, 2003, Oxford, 2010), and has served as a Fulbright Scholar (Argentina) and Fulbright Senior Specialist (Finland, Germany, Mexico). In March, he has again been awarded a Fulbright Senior Specialist grant to advise and lecture at the University of Tallinn, Estonia. For over a decade, he was the drama and film critic for The San Diego Review, winning numerous press awards, including reviews of Old Globe productions of Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and As You Like It, as well as films (Richard III, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream).
Jill Steiner
Director of Education and Outreach
Teaching Shakespeare has been her life’s work. Jill has a Ph.D. in Shakespeare and Renaissance drama from U.C. Berkeley, where she taught for many years before moving to San Diego for a faculty position in the Revelle College Humanities and Writing Program at UCSD. One of her projects at U.C. Berkeley Extension was to coordinate with the California Shakespeare Festival in Orinda to teach the plays being performed there from the perspective of staging a live production as well as from a literary perspective. To that end, the Festival’s directors, designers, and actors would visit her classes to talk to the students about the challenges and decisions that go into a live production. She has also facilitated weekend long seminars for the general public on individual Shakespeare plays, including Hamlet, King Lear, and The Tempest. While at UCSD, she had the opportunity to teach special courses on Shakespeare and Film as well as training students to analyze plays from the standard Shakespeare canon as part of their Humanities curriculum.
Carol Whaley
Carol has a BA and MA in Dramatic Art and an MFA in Design and Technical Theatre. She has been teaching in the Drama Department at San Diego City College for 20 years, and has worked for/with Lamb’s Players, The Globe, SDSU, UCSD, and Point Loma Nazarene theatre departments, Coronado Playhouse, Scripps Ranch Theatre, and many other local community theatres. While her professional production experience is primarily in costume and makeup design, as a teacher she works with students to analyze dramatic literature as not only a study of the text but as a framework for performance.