Megan Burnett, B.S., M.F.A.
Associate Professor
Megan holds a Bachelor of Science in Radio-TV-Film Production from Texas Christian University, and a Master of Fine Arts in Theatre from the University of Louisville. She received graduate theatre training at Oklahoma City University, working under famed opera and music theatre director Carveth Osterhaus before moving to Louisville and receiving her MFA in 1991. Megan was an English Speaking Union Teacher Scholar, taking the “Teaching Shakespeare through Performance” course at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London in 2004. She served as a Japan Fulbright Memorial Fund participant 2005, studying Kabuki, Noh and Bunraku as well as Japanese education practices in Tokyo and Hiroshima. Megan co-founded a theatre training school for adults: StageLab: Ongoing Training for Theatre Artists, and she was a co-founder and board member of The Pleiades Theatre Company. Ms Burnett received the Alice Lloyd College Campus Leadership and Excellence in Teaching Award in 2012. She is a 2014 recipient of a Post-Doctoral Faculty Fellowship from the Appalachian College Association.
Megan has worked in all aspects of radio, video production, film and theatre. She produced three radio drama productions for WMMT, a division of Appalshop and WWJD, Alice Lloyd College’s radio station. She directs for Jenny Wiley Theatre and serves on their board of directors. She works as a Voice and Text coach for area Shakespeare companies. She was a Narrator at the American Printing House for the Blind for several years. She has acted for professional theatre companies in Kentucky, Indiana, Florida, Texas and Oklahoma, and she also performs in her nationally touring production of a one-woman show, Shame the Devil! An Audience with Fanny Kemble.
Megan’s research interests include women in theatre, children’s theatre, Teaching Shakespeare through Performance, Kabuki theatre, and researching women to create plays about them. Right now she is researching Mattie Griffith Browne, a Kentucky Abolitionist and Suffragist with the goal of presenting a one-woman play about her in 2016. Megan is on the Speaker’s Bureau for the Kentucky Humanities Council and has given talks about Mattie Griffith Browne, as well as the Women of the Settlement Schools of Eastern Kentucky. Megan has presented papers and panels at the Southeastern Theatre Conference, Ohio Valley History Conference: Mattie Griffith Browne, Kentucky Abolitionist, Women of the Settlement Schools of Eastern Kentucky, JFK and the Power of Speech, Kentucky Theatre Association, and the Shakespeare in Contemporary Performance Symposium at Appalachian State University: 2014 ALC’s Caudill Players: A Model for Performing Shakespeare in Appalachia.
Most recently Megan published, produced and directed the play Alice Lloyd College: A Light Unto the Mountains. This was a devised script based on oral archives at ALC. National premiere in Washington, D.C. in 2013. Performed there and in Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Florida, North Carolina.
Dr. Zackary Ross
Associate Professor | Honors Program Director
Dr. Zackary Ross has a Ph.D. in Theatre from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a master’s degree in Educational Theatre from New York University, and is an honors graduate of Lewis and Clark College’s theatre department in Portland, Oregon.
In addition to his experience as an educator, Zack is an active theatre artist. As a director, his most recent productions include She Kills Monsters, Romeo & Juliet, Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom, Asking Strangers the Meaning of Life, Commedie of Errors, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Blithe Spirit, and 44 Plays for 44 Presidents.
Zack's research interests include theatrical adaptation, contemporary drama, theatre and social change, early modern drama, and trauma studies. Recently, Zack published a chapter entitled “Too Much Memory: Interrogating the National Trauma of the War on Terror” in Reflecting 9/11: New Narratives of Crisis, Disaster and Change (2016).