EMOS Staff
Co-Founder, EMOS​
Dr. Theresa J. May is Professor Emerita in Theatre Arts at the University of Oregon. As co-founder of EMOS (with Larry Fried), she developed the Ecodrama Playwrights Festival Guidelines and was Artistic Director for the 2009 EMOS Festival at the University of Oregon. She has published widely about the intersections of ecology, cultural and indigenous studies, and performance studies, including "Grotowski's Deep Ecology" in Performing Nature, and "Beyond Bambi: Towards a Dangerous Ecocriticism in Theatre Studies" in a special issue of Theatre Topics on Performance and Ecology. She has published articles in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Theatre Topics, On Stage Studies, American Drama, and Canadian Theatre Review, as well as chapters in several volumes. She co-edited (with Wendy Arons) Readings in Performance and Ecology (Palgrave, 2012). She is the author of Earth Matters on Stage: Ecology and Environment in American Theatre (Routledge, 2020), Salmon is Everything, a community-based play from the Klamath Watershed (Oregon State University Press, 2014). She co-authored, with Larry Fried, Greening Up Our Houses (1994), the first book on sustainable theatre management, and was founding artistic director of Theatre in the Wild in Seattle.
Associate Director, EMOS​
Dr. Cook served as the chair of the Earth Matters on Stage New Play Festival and Symposium in 2018 and is now an associate director (alongside Theresa May) for EMOS. He is former associate professor and chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Alaska Anchorage, where he taught theatre history, playwriting, dramaturgy, and directing until the department's closure in 2023. His research focuses on contemporary British theatre, and he has published on the work of the Cherub Company in the United Kingdom and abroad between 1978 and 2003. He has presented at conferences in the U.S., U.K., and Canada, and published articles and book reviews in, Theatre History Studies, Theatre Survey, Performing Arts Resources and the LMDA Sourcebook. He has served as a contributing editor to Theatre History Studies, as well as the co-editor of a special section in the 2018 volume on politics, theatre, and change.