Creativity in Captivity

A dynamic standup comic & actor with an original blend of storytelling and improvised rock-n-roll comedy. Jen was the 2017 Winner of NPR's Snap Judgement Comedic Performance of the Year for her Girl Scout Cookie Caper story. Kober received the 2018 Comedic Performance of the Year for her story titled Nana Vs. OJ. She appeared on Netflix in 2019 as she joined the casts of RuPaul's sitcom AJ & The Queen and Dead to Me. Jen has also appeared on The Righteous Gemstones on HBO, played a no-nonsense detective in The Purge on USA Network, and was a wacky science teacher in Diary of a Future President on Disney+. Jen has enjoyed a recurring role on American Horror Story, a guest starring role on Showtime's Black Monday, and has been a regular on Apple TV's new queer sitcom, The Browns. Jen is also featured in Audible's Pride Special, Owning It and she booked a hilarious guest starring role on the CBS sitcom How We Roll starring Pete Holmes and Katie Lowes, as well as a quick appearance with Jean Smart on the HBO series Hacks. Keep your eye out for Jen as Sheriff Linda Lawless on Disney Channel’s series Bunk’d and on Disney+ as she joins the Star Wars universe on the epic series The Mandalorian. 

A world-class juggler and visual artist who has performed in 45 different countries, touring solo work and collaborating with companies such as Spiegelworld, The Gandini Juggling Project, Cie Jérôme Thomas, Les 7 doigts de la main, Cirkus Cirkör, Cie Ea Eo, and Cirque du Soleil. Jay is the former head teacher of juggling at the Dans och Cirkushögskolan in Stockholm , Sweden (2000-2019), and has published a book about contemporary juggling titled 5 Catches. He co-hosts a podcast published by the International Jugglers' Association titled Object Episodes, with 3 seasons dedicated to the philosophy of juggling. His current solo Off-Broadway show in New York City is titled REFLEX: Unraveling 4000 Years of Juggling. It is his magnum opus that pays homage to a lifetime of looking at juggling as art, and weaves the history of juggling together with stories about the space program and space travel. Jay Gilligan also runs his own contemporary circus company in Stockholm, called Kapsel along with an internationally touring company named Shaking the Sky.

At the age of 15 while growing up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Lois knew she was destined to be producer/director. What she didn’t know was that over the next 40 years she would stay in Milwaukee and produce and direct content in every industry sector: corporate, non-profit, education, healthcare, and her favorite, broadcast TV. For the past 15 years she teamed up with comedian/actor John McGivern and created the number one local PBS show in the country, and was awarded two Emmy's for her effort. (Yes, regional Emmy's still count!) She is currently producing and directing John McGivern's Main Streets, a Midwest travel show, airing on PBS. She lives in Wisconsin with her husband and kids, and works with a great production company in Milwaukee, Plum Media.

A British video game developer and director best known as the writer of Her Story, the two Silent Hill games, Silent Hill: Origins and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, and  Immortality. He previously worked as a game director at Climax Studios before leaving in 2014 to become an independent game developer. He published his first indie game, Her Story, in June of 2015. In 2017, Sam founded Half Mermaid, a video game production company based in Brooklyn, New York.

A musical standup comedian with appearances on Last Comic Standing and NBC’s Bring On the Funny. Kristin has six full-length comedy albums and her own Dry Bar Comedy Special. Kristin grew up a minister’s daughter in a small town in West Texas. Much like Footloose, she was raised in a no-drinking, no-dancing, no instrumental music environment, so she immediately took up drinking, dancing and playing an instrument. Proving that the almighty has a strange sense of humor, Kristin came out of the closet at age 15. Needless to say, it did not go well. Kristin decided to “take it back”, retreating back into the closet, and trying a little harder to be straight. In college to become a paramedic she signed up for an open mic night at a local comedy club. As soon as she got on the stage, she felt right at home. Small shows in the Texas panhandle eventually turned into 35 states worth of comedy over the next 5 years. When Last Comic Standing held their auditions in Austin, Texas, Key stood in line hoping for a chance to be seen. After a 7 hour wait, she got that chance as well as her ticket to Hollywood to compete with the best in the comedy world. At the end of the season, she stood among the final six and watched as her fan base exploded. With validation from millions of comedy fans, Kristin moved to L.A. and began preparing a new act to take on the road. While participating in an anti-bullying fundraiser, she broke her silence and decided to share her hilarious story of coming out, taking it back, living in the closet, and meeting her wife. After 15 years of comedy, Kristin has found a way to perfectly blend her thought provoking true stories and her original songs with outrageous off-the-cuff improv moments, ensuring that no two shows are the same. Her social media videos have over 25 million views and Kristin has over 275,00 followers. She hosts the Kristin Knows Blank podcast.

An award-winning global director of cirque, cinema and stage. As a comic act designer he specializes in clowns, characters and story components. Stefan is the author of The Power of HA!Connecting Through the Heart of Humor. He studied theatre in college only to realize that his true passion lay in the cross-over to the circus arts, so he set his sights on Cirque du Soleil. As a result of his intuitive gift for mining actors’ true potential, various sit-coms hired him to coach actors, including The Roseanne Show. After self-producing a number of critically acclaimed plays in Hollywood and New York City (Call of the Wild, Midsummer Nite’s Text, Your Town Follies, Moon Over Madness, Atomic Holiday Lift-Off) he traveled to Europe to juggle on the streets and study with the premiere master-teacher, Philippe Gaulier. This move resulted in a collaboration with Bill Irwin and David Shiner on the Tony- winning show Fool Moon. Haves was then poached by Cirque du Soleil, collaborating on clown and character performances within six touring and resident productions (Kooza, Iris, Amaluna, Banana Shpeel, Zaya, and Drawn to Life). Prior to that, he wrote and directed the world-class Teatro Zinzanni—a dinner/ cabaret featuring such luminaries as Joan Baez. Today, Stefan Haves is a trusted international thought-leader who was tapped to present a TedX Talk in New Delhi, India, and was invited to conduct personal appearances for blue-chip companies like PepsiCo, Infosys, Mindtree, and Barclays Bank. He gleefully shares his innovative message on the role of humor, creativity, and effective expression gleaned from the stage and applied to the corporate workplace. In 2021 Haves was granted the opportunity to co-direct Katy Perry’s Playland-branded New Year’s dinner/cirque event at Hilton’s Resort World in Las Vegas. Earlier in his career, Haves cut his teeth as an actor and a visual-comedian who appeared on stages and television shows worldwide—even garnering $10,000 on America’s Funniest People by performing his signature piece "Back-Man". Stefan’s 2016 original conception of the spectacle Festigal, in which Haves was tasked to showcase famous pop celebrities from television’s Romania’s Got Talent, used a Cirque du Soleil aesthetic in a stadium setting. His cinematic offerings include the award-winning short film Punch Drunk, featuring Academy Award nominee Sally Kellerman (M*A*S*H) and full-length feature Stalled starring Doug Jones (Pan’s Labyrinth).

Billy McGuigan is the creator director of several internationally touring shows including Rave On! The Buddy Holly Experience, Yesterday and Today: The Interactive Beatles Experience, and Billy McGuigan’s Pop Rock Orchestra. Career highlights include performing with Buddy Holly’s contemporaries Tommy Allsup and Sonny West and headlining Las Vegas with Yesterday and Today: The Interactive Beatles Experience. Billy’s love of music comes directly from his father who introduced Billy to The Beatles’ music at an early age. With an out of tune guitar and tattered Beatles chord book, Billy, his brothers and dad spent countless hours at the dining room table learning and crafting Beatles songs. Shortly after Billy’s dad lost a battle with leukemia in 1996 at age 42, the McGuigan brothers turned to the music their Dad taught them as kids to help deal with the loss of their father. Not only did they find healing in the music, but it led to the creation of Rave On Productions, whose mission is to create live concert experiences with the sole purpose of connecting an audience together through memories and music. Billy was recently inducted into the Nebraska Music Hall of Fame and has won the Spotlight Award for Best Actor in a Musical, an Omaha Entertainment and Arts Award, and the Midland Business Journal’s 40 under 40 award, as well as a CPAC Alumni Award for Excellence in Public Service from the Faculty and Staff at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. In 2021, Billy opened the McGuigan Arts Academy, providing year-round classes, camps and lessons dedicated to teaching life skills through the arts.

JENN ELY, a production designer and illustrator, discusses her work in animation and children's books. Topics include the influence of movies on artistic style, the power of color in visual storytelling, the process of stop-motion animation, qualities for visual development artists, and the impact of social media on inspiration. The guest also shares her experience illustrating a book about the gardener of Alcatraz and expresses gratitude for the show.

A theatre director, puppeteer, and African American theatre historian and archivist that seeks to disrupt generational curses of self-hate, racism, homophobia, and religious intolerance. Intellectually curious and emotionally dexterous, Jerrell is at home in a wide range of genres including, but not limited to, American Realism, Magical Realism, Traditional and Contemporary Musical Theatre, Poetic Black-Queer Narratives, and Live Spectacle Events. He is the recipient of a 2023 Henson Foundation Workshop Grant and the 2022 League of Chicago Theatre’s Samuel G. Roberson Fellowship. Recent projects include directing Reverie by James Ijames (2022 Pulitzer Prize recipient for Fat Ham) with Azuka Theatre in Philadelphia, co-directing Marys Seacole by Jackie Sibblies Drury with Griffin Theatre in Chicago, and collaborating with The Classical Theatre of Harlem and St. Ann’s Warehouse on: When The World Sounds Like A Prayer in Bryant Park in NYC. Other credits include Mlima’s Tale with Griffin Theatre (Jeff Award nomination for Direction and Best Play), The River with BoHo Theatre, and Untitled with Inis Nua (Barrymore Award nomination for Outstanding Direction of a Play). His puppet short films include a filmed version of his signature puppetry piece, I Am The Bear with The Chicago International Puppet Theatre Festival. His other puppet short films include, Hamlin: La Revue Sombre with Heather Henson’s Handmade Puppet Dreams and Diamond’s Dream with Chicago Children’s Theatre. His Juneteenth Puppet Protest: The Welcome Table was featured in the New York Times and his Fall 2020 puppetry celebration of the lives of John Lewis and C.T. Vivian titled, Black Butterfly was later expanded into an educational performance piece with Tria Smith of Guild Row and a student collective working with Urban Growers Collective on Chicago’s South Side. He received his MFA in Theatre Directing from Northwestern University, is an artistic associate with Black Lives, Black Words, is a member of Lincoln Center’s Directors Lab, and was a Henson Foundation sponsored participant at the Eugene O’Neill National Puppetry Conference.  As a theatre historian and archivist, Jerrell contributed to Fifty Key Musicals (Routledge Press). He authored the chapter on Shuffle Along (1921) and co-authored the chapter on The Wiz (1975). 

More backstage banter from the green room of The Lucille Ball Comedy Festival presented by The National Comedy Center in Lucy’s hometown of Jamestown, NY. Comics from across the U.S. whose credits include Saturday Night Live, The Tonight Show, Last Comic Standing, Conan, Late Night with Seth Meyers and The Late Show with David Letterman bring their unique brand of humor to the podcast and take the audience on a journey into their creative process. This episode features observations, insight and inspirations from Paul Morrisey, Eitan Levine, Marcus Monroe, Dean Edwards, Chris Martin and Rachel Feinstein.