Since its inception, visual artist and writer Timothy E. Young has been the Chief Executive Director of Puppetry Arts Theatre, Inc. Mr. Young is a veteran Arts In Education teacher, he composes and produces original musicals through Puppetry Arts for broad audiences,  designs and builds puppets of various mediums, and coordinates and facilitates community events and performances.

 

Mr. Young received a BA of Fine Arts at Francis Marion University of Florence, South Carolina with professional acting and theatre studies at the Oxford School of Drama of England, studying under professionals from the Royal National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Theatre. He is an alumnus of the puppetry performance workshop of Sesame Street. Mr. Young is also the creator and performer behind Tuffy Tiger, the character featured in his 2017 album Songs & Music For Me showcasing 10 original songs. He is also the puppet designer for the musical Anthropomorphic and the one-act play Miss Dot: A Child of Slavery featuring Bunraku-Style puppetry.

Josu Ortiz is a composer and pianist from Caracas, Venezuela. His musical education began at the age of 5 singing in the school choir. By the age of 9 he was receiving private instruction in music and cuatro and enrolled at the Juan Jose Landaeta Conservatory of Music to study piano and musical theory, where he remained for five years. He also played with the Conservatory Estudiantina, with whom he recorded the album of the Conservatory Choir.

 

After graduating from high school, he went on to his Associates Degree in Audio Engineering at Taller de Arte Sonoro and studied jazz harmony and piano under the tutelage of Gerry Weil, graduating from the Taller de Jazz Caracas in Jazz Piano Performance. After falling for the music production process, he decided to study at Berklee College of Music a Dual Major Degree in Composition and Contemporary Writing and Production.

 

Josu founded his Latin Jazz Band in 2015, and he recorded an album that was released on May, 2017, called Black and White Steps, were he combined Venezuelan traditional grooves like, Onda Nueva and Merengue Caraqueño, with rhythms from Cuba, like Songo and Bembé. He also CoFounded Venezuelan Project, that has become an important band in the Boston music scene. With this band, he has played at Scullers Jazz Club and House of Blues. They have also been featured at important events like Berklee Fund Raising Gala and the Beantown Jazz Festival.

Matthew is a freelance scenic and lighting designer, and former technical director, who has worked across the nation including NYC, Philadelphia, Baltimore, San Francisco, and The Berkshires, and as far away as Santiago, Chile. Most recently Matthew worked on the world premiere play Ghost Light: The Haunting which opened at the Abingdon Theater in NYC. In Philadelphia, he is the Resident Scenic Designer at The Media Music Theatre and is proud to work as a lighting designer with Mauckingbird Theatre Company. In the Berkshires, at Shakespeare & Company, he started the season with a wild version of A Comedy of Errors and capped off the 2015 season with the American company premiere of Red Velvet.

 

He’s returning in the summer of 2016 to design lighting for King Lear and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. As a faculty member at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA he serves as Director of Production for the Center for the Performing and Cinematic Arts and is the Head of the Theater Education program. He is a product of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (MFA in Technical Production) and Francis Marion University.