PATTI BOULAYE OBE
Patti is a singer, author, actress, public speaker, lecturer, painter, show producer, wife, a proud mother of two children and has a cherished grandson. She was awarded an OBE in Her Majesty The Queen's Birthday Honours List for her charity work in the UK & Sub-Saharan Africa. For over 30 years Patti has supported many charities in the UK. Her experience with the charities came in handy when she launched her charity Support For Africa (SFA) at the Royal Albert Hall with 3000 Gospel Singers and Stars of stage and screen. SFA has built 5 healthcare clinics and a school in Africa. Patti was on HM The Queen's Golden Jubilee Creative Committee, for which she organized and lead her 5000 Gospel Singers down The Mall. In October 2018 Patti was awarded an Honorary Doctorate Degree for services to The Arts and Education by the Joint Council of Churches just after she appeared in the BBCTV series “Celebrity Master Chef” among other national TV shows. 2017 marked the 46th Anniversary of Patti’s West End debut in the musical “Hair”. Patti was a long-serving member of the Board of Governors of BADA. https://www.pattiboulaye.comCHRISTOPHER COOK
Christopher Cook has taught on Study Abroad programmes for three decades. He was joint Dean of BADA in 2016/17 and a trustee of BADA between 2018 and 2022. Christopher began his career as a documentary film maker at the BBC and has been a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio since the 1970s. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of the Arts London and an honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck College and Queen Mary’s University London. He has been a trustee of Cheltenham Festivals and Chair of Bishopsgate Institute. Christopher continues to review classical music and is currently Chair of Deal Music and Arts, a charity that stages the annual Deal Festival and runs a year-long music education programme in schools in East Kent.BRIAN COX
Brian Cox is the Patron of the British American Drama Academy. An Olivier, Emmy, Lortel, and Golden Globe-winning actor and director, Brian is a celebrated presence on stage and screen in both Great Britain and the United States and has been for more than five decades. His career spans theatre: King Lear and Richard III (National Theatre), Rat in the Skull (Royal Court), Titus Andronicus (Royal Shakespeare Company), The Championship Season (Broadway), Rock ‘n’ Roll (Broadway), and Art (Broadway); film: Churchill, The Bourne Identity, X2: X-Men United, Adaptation, Rob Roy, and Braveheart; and television: Succession, Frasier, Nuremberg, and Deadwood.SIR DEREK JACOBI CBE
Founding company member of the National Theatre, where he appeared with Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, Peter O'Toole and others in productions of Othello, Hamlet and a great many others. Won Tony Award for performances in Cyrano de Bergerac and Much Ado About Nothing. He is also well known for his roles in I Claudius and Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet and playing Malvolio at the Donmar Warehouse.HENRY GOODMAN
Henry Goodman is an acclaimed actor who has worked in theatre, television, film and radio. He has recently starred as Constant Coquelin in the Richmond Theatre’s Edmond de Bergerac, and played Lucian Freud in Looking at Lucian in Ustinov Studio, Bath. Henry has acted at the RSC multiple times, including playing the title characters in Volpone and Richard III. He has also had starring roles in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (Duchess Theatre, Chichester Festival Theatre), The Winslow Boy (Old Vic), Holy Rosenburgs (National Theatre) and in Yes, Prime Minister (Chichester Festival Theatre/West End). Other credits include Duet for One with Juliet Stevenson, Fiddler on the Roof, The Birthday Party with Eileen Atkins and Chicago in the West End, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, After the Fall, Broken Glass, Guys and Dolls, Summerfolk and Trevor Nunn’s production of The Merchant of Venice for which he won the Olivier Actor of the Year Award at the National Theatre. He won the Best Supporting Actor Award in 1992 for his performance as the original Roy Cohn in Angels in America, the Olivier Award as Best Actor in a Musical in 1993 for Assassins, and in 1994 was nominated as Best Actor of the Year for his performance in Hysteria at the Royal Court. Broadway credits include Art and Tarfuffe. Recent TV and film work includes the highly acclaimed Yes, Prime Minister, The Damned United and Taking Woodstock.JOHN GORRIE
John has written and directed extensively for the BBC and PBS, including Edward VII, Lillie, Rumpole of the Bailey, The Ruth Rendell Mysteries, Sherlock Holmes, Coronation Street, Eastenders, three Shakespeare plays for BBC TV and, recently, Cause Celebre with Helen Mirren.MARGOT HARLEY
Margot Harley co-founded The Acting Company with the late John Houseman in 1972. She co-produced the Broadway productions of The Robber Bridegroom and The Curse of an Aching Heart with Faye Dunaway. She produced John Houseman's celebrated revival of Marc Blitzstein's musical play The Cradle Will Rock in New York and at the Old Vic Theatre in London. Off-Broadway, she produced Ten by Tennessee, a two evening retrospective of Tennessee Williams' one-act plays directed by Michael Kahn at The Lucille Lortel Theater, and the New York premiere of Eric Overmyer's On the Verge, directed by Garland Wright at The John Houseman Theater. She was Administrator of the Drama Division of The Juilliard School for its first twelve years, from 1968 to 1980. Prior to that she appeared in numerous Broadway and off-Broadway productions as an actress and dancer. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, she attended LAMDA on a Fulbright Scholarship.JOHN HEFFERNAN
He has played extensive roles at the National including the title role in Edward II; She Stoops to Conquer; Emperor and Galilean; The Revenger's Tragedy and Major Barbara. For the RSC he has starred as J Robert Oppenheimer in Oppenheimer, performed in King Lear, The Seagull, Romeo and Juliet and Much Ado About Nothing. Other theatre work includes The Hothouse (Trafalgar Studios), Love and Information (The Royal Court Theatre), and The Physicists (Donmar Warehouse).KELLY HUNTER MBE
Kelly is an award winning actor, director and writer. Over the last thirty years she has played major roles for the RSC, National theatre, English Touring theatre and the Icelandic company Vesturport, working with Jerome Savary, Hal Prince, Sir Peter Hall and Sir Trevor Nunn. She has also worked extensively in film, TV and radio. Kelly is the Artistic Director of Flute Theatre, for whom her most recent production of Hamlet, Who’s There? performed at the Gdansk Shakespeare Festival in August 2015. In 2014 she directed a production of The Tempest for the RSC which she adapted for children with autism. She is the author of two books, Shakespeare’s Heartbeat, drama games for children with autism published by Routledge and Cracking Shakespeare; A hands-on guide for actors and directors published by Methuen in December 2015. From 2002-2006 she was the Artistic director of Touchstone Shakespeare Theatre, which she created to offer Shakespeare to children with no access to the arts. Kelly has created a series of sensory drama games named The Hunter Heartbeat Method, which form her work with children with autism. This methodology has the basis of a longitudinal study at Ohio State University since 2011.DAVID LEVEAUX
David Leveaux is an Emmy and five-time Tony Award nominated director who has worked extensively in London and on Broadway. Recent work: Director of the multi Emmy Award winning Jesus Christ Superstar Live for NBC, the feature film The Exception with Christopher Plummer, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with Daniel Radcliffe at the Old Vic, London and David Hare’s Plenty with Rachel Weisz for The Public Theatre New York. Previous work: Closer (Donmar Warehouse), Romeo and Juliet(Broadway), Arcadia (West End and Broadway, Tony nomination for best revival), Cyrano de Bergerac (Broadway), Jumpers (National Theatre and Broadway, Tony nominations for outstanding direction and best revival), The Real Thing (Donmar Warehouse and Broadway, Tony Award for best revival, nominated for outstanding direction), Fiddler on the Roof (Broadway, Tony nomination for best revival), Nine (Donmar Warehouse and Broadway, Tony Award for best revival, nominated for outstanding direction), The Glass Menagerie (Broadway), Anna Christie (Broadway, Tony Award for best revival, nominated for outstanding direction), No Man’s Land (Almeida), Betrayal (Almeida and Broadway, Tony nomination for best revival), Electra (Donmar Warehouse and Broadway, Tony nomination for best revival), Moonlight(Almeida), The Distance From Here (Almeida), Romeo and Juliet (RSC), A Moon for the Misbegotten (Riverside, West End and Broadway, Tony nominations for outstanding direction and best revival), The Late Middle Classes (Donmar Warehouse), Sinatra Live at the London Palladium, The Father (National Theatre), ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (RSC), Rudolph(Vienna), Tales of Ballycumber and The Three Sisters (Abbey Theatre, Dublin), The Turn of the Screw (Scottish Opera), The Marriage of Figaro and Salome (ENO).PIPPA NIXON
Pippa Nixon trained at Manchester School of Theatre. She has had numerous roles in film and television as well as recording drama for BBC Radio, but she is best known for her critically acclaimed theatre work. During her early successful stage career, Nixon took on a mixture of roles in both contemporary and classical writing. In 2011, after stints at Shakespeare’s Globe where she was commended in the Ian Charleson Awards for her portrayal of Jessica in The Merchant of Venice, Nixon moved to the Royal Shakespeare Company to take on a number of lead roles. Other theatre roles include Ophelia in Hamlet; Rosalind in As You Like It, and Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the RSC. Also for the RSC: Days of Significance, King John and Cardenio. Other theatre work includes Bea, Joe Guy, The Zoo Reading (Soho Theatre); Timon of Athens, Holding Fire! (Globe); The Trestle At Pope Lick Creek (Belfast/Tour); The Method (Oval House); Balm in Gilead Masterpieces (50th Anniversary Season) (Young Vic); and Reading (Royal Court).FIONA SHAW CBE
Theatre: Electra (voted Actress of the Year), Taming of the Shrew (RSC), The Good Person of Setzuan, Machinal (voted Actress of the Year) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Richard II As You Like It, The Waste Land, Medea, Happy Days and Mother Courage (National). TV includes Hedda Gabler (BBC / HBO.) Film includes My Left Foot, Catch and Release, The Black Dahlia, Fracture and the Harry Potter films. In 2001, she was awarded an honorary CBE.DEIRDRE SIMPSON
Deirdre is the former Director of Alumni Relations for Richmond, The American International University in London. She was a long-serving member of the Board of Governors of BADA.SIMON STOKES
Trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, Simon is a freelance director, dramaturg, producer and, broadly, a new play specialist. As Artistic Director of the Bush Theatre in the 1970’s and 80’s, he produced, directed and mentored many now distinguished British playwrights, introduced several of the works of Franz Xaver Kroetz to the UK as well as plays in translation by Wolfgang Bauer, Jean Jordheuil and Manuel Puig and produced a new generation of American playwrights for London audiences. In the 1980’s and 90’s Simon was Associate Director and Director of Development for the producer, Howard Panter, commissioning and directing new plays for West End production as well as directing freelance in Germany, Switzerland, Israel and the USA. For the past twenty years he has been Artistic Director at the Theatre Royal Plymouth, producing, co-producing and presenting new plays, predominantly in the award-winning contemporary theatre programme of the theatre’s Drum studio. World premieres by British writers have included plays by Abi Morgan, Rona Munro, April de Angelis, Debbie Tucker Green, Anthony Neilson, Carl Grose, Mike Bartlett, James Graham and Jack Thorne. Foreign writers have included Mikhail Durnenkov, Roland Schimmelpfennig, the Presnyakov brothers, Sachli Ghomalalizad, Matthew Lopez and Sarah Ruhl. Frequent co-producing partners have been Frantic Assembly, ATC, Paines Plough, Told By An Idiot, Graeae, sKaGeN, Hoipolloi and, in particular, the Belgian company Ontroerend Goed, serial winners of Edinburgh Festival Fringe Firsts amongst many accolades around the world and currently in their eleventh major collaboration with Plymouth. Simon was a long-serving member of the Board of Governors of BADA.