Our People

Board of Directors

Producing Artistic Director

Carmela relocated to Baltimore, Maryland in 2006 to pursue an MFA degree in theatre from Towson University. She graduated from the program, designed for self-producing artists who create original work, in May 2009. Her final thesis project, a co-production of Bump in the Road Theatre and Towson, was a play entitled Bury the Hatchet (a play about forgiveness), which she wrote and directed. Comprised of monologues inspired by first-person stories, memoir and found texts, Hatchet explores the idea of forgiveness through poetry, music and text, challenging notions of who can forgive, and what, if anything, is unforgiveable.

In addition to her course work at Towson, Carmela wrote and produced an original theatre presentation for Chana's 13th Anniversary Fundraising event in October 2008, based on interviews with the support organizations staff and clients. She also created and produced the keynote entertainment for GEM's "BeDazzled" event in 2009, also inspired by interviews with at-risk teens whom the organization serves.

Other Baltimore activities include directing a staged reading for Run of the Mill Theater's South African Play Festival, and teaching theater to middle school students at the Greenmount School and Pimlico Community Center. Carmela attended the Maryland Art/Teacher Institute, which explores integrating the arts into the curriculum, and was in residency at the Ko Festival in Amherst, Massachusetts in 2006, where she worked on developing a new play.

Prior to moving to Baltimore, Carmela lived and worked in Portland, Oregon where she co-founded Bump in the Road Theatre (BUMP) in 2002. Dedicated to exploring the 'bumps in the road of life,' BUMP has produced a variety of theatrical experiences including the creation of three new plays: Adventures in Ill-Care, a play exploring the challenges of the healthcare system in America; (Old Age Ain't) No Place for Sissies, a play about aging and caregiving; I Think About Life, exploring end-of-life issues; and many special events including tours of both Life and Sissies.

Before founding BUMP, Carmela directed several projects for a variety of theaters in Portland. A frequent collaborator on new scripts, she has directed full premiere productions of The Time Between, Janie Bigo and Lady Buddha with two-time Peabody winner and MediaRites Producer Dmae Roberts, The Gift of Speech with Ellen West Productions, and already scripted plays including Tongue of a Bird, Yerma, Gertrude McFuzz, and numerous staged readings. Carmela led the theater program at Concordia University/Portland for four seasons, where she directed student and community productions and taught acting and creative drama. Favorite projects there include Quilters, archy & mehitabel, Romeo & Juliet, Godspell, and The Real Inspector Hound.

Carmela worked in Education and Outreach at Portland Opera for several years where she designed and administered its first Resident Artists program, managed their tours and ran the student dress rehearsal program. She directed outreach productions of Hansel and Gretel, An American Magic Flute and other projects with the Resident Artists.

Carmela has worked extensively as a guest artist in K-12 classes through Young Audiences, the Regional Arts Council's Neighborhood Arts Program and self-produced projects, including original work written and performed by student artists as well as previously scripted material.

An actor as well as a director, Carmela has worked with many Portland companies including Artists Repertory Theatre, Miracle Theatre, Northwest Children's Theatre, Portland Center Stage, Portland Repertory Theatre, Quintessence Theatre and Stark Raving Theatre. She is a member of Actors Equity Association, Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA), and Theatre Communications Group (TCG).

Playwrights Project Producer

Ellen is the West Coast Producer of Bump in the Road Theatre's initiatives in Portland, Oregon. BUMP's main western activities in 2009 are a show in Portland's Fertile Ground Festival at the end of January, 2010, and a play development workshop in March through June, 2010, for Oregon and Washington members of the Dramatists Guild.

Ellen's qualifications for this job are as varied as her experiences over a long life teaching at the college level and working in theater, film, and television. Fresh out of college, she worked at Young and Rubicam in New York. As a young married she taught and developed courses in writing at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas. When Washburn acquired a commercial television station and turned it into Kansas's first public television channel, Ellen was a writer-producer on the staff. Thereafter she was on the Board of Topeka's community theater and wrote short educational plays for them. Still interested in the electronic media, she formed her own company, Independent Media Productions, and made nationally distributed films on the subject of women's issues.

On "retiring" to Portland in 1992, Ellen returned to her first love, the stage, which had engaged her since she appeared in an Our Gang comedy at the age of five. In Portland she was a writer and founding Board member of Northwest Senior Theatre. In 1995, she was encouraged by an acceptance at Portland's Stark Raving Theatre to expand beyond sketches for the elderly to comedies for general audiences. Ellen went on to submit her work in many places which resulted in her winning two first prizes and productions across the country for both her short and her long plays. In 2001, she became a founding Board member and one of the writers for Bump in the Road Theatre, contributing to its plays until 2005.

For more about Ellen and her plays, please visit her website Ellen West - Playwright.