Meet The Instructors

of our 2025 Summer Intensives!

TJ Lukacsina, Directing

TJ is honored to be returning to work with the Free Theatre again. He has held the position of Artistic Director for both Silhouette Stages and Heritage Players. During his tenure on the boards he was also the Board Representative for the Washington Area Theatre Community Honors (WATCH) where he also held the position of Chair for a term and worked to implement policy change that eliminated gendered awards for acting. Back in the 2019 WATCH Award for Outstanding Light Design for a Musical (Cabaret) and has received multiple nominations for Outstanding Direction and Musicals. He has also conducted the pit orchestra for Hammond High School in Columbia for the past 17 years. LIGHTING: Puffs, The SpongeBob Musical, Sondheim on Sondheim, The Color Purple, The Mountaintop, The Lightning Thief, The Drowning Girls, Jekyll & Hyde: An Immersive Experience, Striking 12, Always Patsy Cline, Murder Ballad, Cabaret, ‘Night, Mother, Into the Woods, and Sweeney Todd. DIRECTING: The Lightning Thief, Cinderella, Hairspray, Big Fish, Legally Blonde, Into the Woods, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Sweeney Todd, White Christmas.

Rikki Howie Lacewell, Choreography, Auditioning

Rikki (she/her) is a WATCH nominated choreographer, director and performer based in the Washington DC area. She has worked extensively in the Professional and Community Theater community over the past 20 plus years. Rikki has been teaching workshops with The Free Theatre since the beginning!

Marci Shegogue, Music Directing, Auditioning, Pit Musicians

Marci (she/her) has served as music director has served as Music Director for hundreds of professional, community and educational productions in the D.C. area over the past 40 years. In addition to working with The Free Theater since its inception, she is the resident Music Director for Free Range Humans, a professional immersive theater company. Marci has worked extensively with educational musical theater.. Some favorite productions include Once (American University), The Prom (Univ of MD), Little Women (Univ of MD and Montgomery College), Mamma Mia, Newsies and Anastasia (Quince Orchard HS Theater), Jekyll and Hyde (immersive), Murder Ballad, Always Patsy Cline, Striking 12, 35mm (Free Range Humans), Double Trouble (Imagination Stage), Infinite Future: A Celebration of Leonard Bernstein (Monumental Theater), Aida and In the Heights (Northwest High School), Spamalot and Forever Plaid (Rockville Musical Theater). She is a University of Maryland theater and music department alumnus. Marci recently received the 2024 BlackRock Center for the Arts Visionary Award recipient for her extensive work in Montgomery County as an educator, collaborative accompanist, mentor, audition coach and freelance musician.

Kristina Martin, Costume Design, Make-up and Hair Design

Kristina (she/her) is excited to be working with The Free Theatre this summer! She has a Theatre degree from The College of William and Mary, where she worked as the Wardrobe Supervisor. Her DMV Costume Designer and Wardrobe Supervisor credits include: Virginia Shakespeare Festival, NextStop Theatre Company, Infinity Theatre Company, Shakespeare Theatre Company, Silver Spring Stage, Studio Theatre, Theatre Prometheus, bel Cantanti Opera Company, Urban Arias, Keegan Theatre, Washington National Opera, Brave Spirits Theatre, Land and Hungry Theatre Company, 4615 Theatre, Catholic University, Towson University, and Forum Theatre Company. As the Resident Designer and Shop Manager of Transcendence Theatre Company in Sonoma, CA, Kristina won awards for 2019 Best Costume Design from Broadway World Bay Area, as well as Costume Designer of the Decade. Recent local work includes multiple productions with Imagination Stage and Flint Hill Performing Arts Program. This is her third summer teaching for The Free Theatre!

Jordan Hersh, Lighting Design

Jordan (they/them) is a DC based theater maker with a focus in lighting design, stage management, and production management. Recent lighting design credits include The Color Purple (BlackRock Center for the Arts), Red Herring (Montgomery Playhouse), and Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder (Victorian Lyric Opera Company). They graduated from University of California Santa Cruz in 2016 with a double major in Theater Arts and Environmental Studies. They have been working as the Assistant Technical Director at BlackRock Center for the Arts since 2022 and have been production managing for Free Theater since August of 2024. In their free time they enjoy Dungeons and Dragons, rock climbing, and contra dancing.

Elly Makowski, Sound Design, Projection Design

Elly is the Technical Director for BlackRock Center for the Arts in Germantown, MD. She has been working as a sound designer on many productions, including most recently BlackRock’s The Color Purple and Carroll Community Colleges’ Don’t Dress for Dinner. Since graduating in 2016 from The Sheffield Institute of the Recording Arts in 2016, she has been working on all things sound related for many venues including Adventure Theatre, Everyman Theater, F. Scott Fitzgerald Theater, and many more.

Rooster Sultan, Props Design, Accessibility Roundtable

Roosteris a prop designer/artisan and technical theater educator in the DC area. She is a Teaching Artist with Adventure Theatre MTC. Some of her recent prop design credits include: Mojada, The Visit, A New Brain, The Amateurs, Men on Boats, Dontrell Who Kissed the Sea, The Nether (Montgomery College); Human Museum, Sometimes the Rain Sometimes the Sea, Chemical Exile, Synthesis (Rorschach Theatre); Possumneck Playhouse, Blackwell Island, The Pursued and the Tired (Signature in the Schools); Quilters, The Rainmaker (1st Stage). Rooster is a graduate of The University of North Georgia and a member of USITT – Chesapeake Region.

Carla Dias, Puppetry

I am Carla and I am a Puppeteer! I started when I was a kid, when I started to animate my toys, creating stories with them. I earned a Bachelor of Design at the University of Algarve, Portugal. When I finished college, I took a theatre course for a year in ACTA (A Companhia de Teatro do Algarve) a professional theatre company in Portugal. We did a final show, a Greek tragedy Antígona, and then they invited me to join VATE! VATE was a project where a double- decker bus was transformed into a theatre. Through VATE, I got to experiment with both the technical and performance aspects of theatre. I served as a sound and lighting technician, actress and puppeteer, designed and built puppets, sets, and costumes; worked with shadows, and for eight years, did whatever was needed in the puppet universe!

Jessica Vogel, Improv and Theatre Games, Acting Scenes

Jess is the Artistic Director at Quince Orchard High School’s QO Theatre. She also teaches Theatre and English. She has been directing and teaching theatre for over 10 years in MCPS and has been involved in theatre since a young age. She is ready to have fun this summer with The Free Theatre and is excited to be teaching 2 classes this summer!

Alicia Bloomfield, MT Vocals – Group Singing

Alicia is a dynamic music educator in Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS), a dedicated vocal coach, and a trained performer in both classical voice and musical theatre. With a passion for empowering young artists, she helps students find their voice and soar beyond the stage. Her mission? To help every performer feel changed for good. When it comes to vocal coaching, she’s all about helping students defy gravity.

Cynthia Molina Diehl, MT Voice – Individual Coaching

Cynthia is currently the choral director at Julius West Middle School in Rockville, Maryland. She was previously at Rockville High School for five years (MD). She taught in Florida schools for 15 years before moving to Maryland. She obtained her B.M.E. and M.M.E. in Choral Music Education from The Florida State University College of Music. She is an active member of MdMEA, MCMEA, NAfME and ACDA. For both Florida ACDA and Southern Division ACDA, Cynthia served as Chair for Ethnic and Multicultural Perspectives. She is an active solo, ensemble and choral adjudicator and soloist. She and her wonderful husband, Nathan, have two amazing sons, who are both in choir at their respective schools.

Melanie Barber, Dance Styles

Melanie is a DC-area dance instructor and choreographer. She was trained in ballet, jazz, lyrical, tap, modern, and hip-hop, from childhood through college. For the past 19 years, she has worked with educational and community theater groups in the area. Currently, she teaches at HST Cultural Arts, Inc. She also has the privilege of choreographing the musical productions at Quince Orchard High School. She’s excited to be working with The Free Theatre team again this summer!
Check out her dance instagram: @melaniejoydance

Chris Sisson, Music Theory & Composition

Chris has been studying and performing music for 20+ years. Chris has an A.A. Degree in Music Performance (Jazz Guitar) from Howard Community College, where he’s studied with Micheal Raitzyk, Alan Blackman, and Kyle Coughlin. Over the past 15 years, he’s performed in a number of musical theater pit orchestras in the Baltimore/Washington suburbs. In 2017, he wrote and performed original solo guitar compositions for the Arts Collective production of Truman Capote’s Holiday Memories. He is also a member of Yawd Lynk Band, a maryland based Reggae group led by Tony Roy. In addition to performing, Chris has a passion for teaching and sharing his appreciation for music with others. Chris also has worked as a stagehand throughout the DMV area. In his spare time, Chris enjoys horror movies, baseball season, skateboarding, and spending time with his friends/family/his cat nephews.

Chloe Weiss, Dramaturgy

Chloe (she/they) is a conductor, composer, and performing artist based in North Bethesda. After taking an introductory dramaturgy class in her first year of college, she took an instant liking to research within the arts, promptly becoming one of the youngest assistant dramaturgs for the University of Pittsburgh’s mainstage shows. Three years later, her musical research was published, and she has never looked back. A proud “professional theatre kid”, Chloe is thrilled to teach the true meaning of what it is to be a theatrical encyclopedia. When she is not hyper-analysing a musical score or script, Chloe enjoys cooking, losing track of time at Barnes and Noble, and Fleetwood Mac.

Hope Villanueva, Playwriting

Hope’s writing explores the humanity of characters in their most challenging moments. Her work has been presented by Theatre Alliance, Honolulu Theatre for Youth, Next Act! New Play Summit at Capitol Repertory Theatre, Baltimore Playwrights’ Festival, The Black and Latino Playwrights’ Conference, The Kennedy Center Page to Stage Festival, The Discovery New Play Festival, The Kitchen Dog New Play Festival. The Women’s Voices Festival, INKubator On Air and WTF Occupy the Space Festival, Rapid Lemon, NextStop Theatre Company, and The Wayward Artist. Her plays have been selected as O’Neill Conference Semi-Finalist (2022, 2024) and Finalist (2020). Her newest play, Atrium, had a reading at Latinx Playwright’s Circle in NYC. Vanishing Girl: A New Musical (with William Yanesh, book and lyrics), was hosted for multiple readings at NYC’s Latiné Musical Theatre Lab and a developmental workshop at Flying V in Washington, DC in 2023. Her play, BUZZ, was selected for the 2023 Valdez Theatre Conference and 2023 AGE Legacy Playwright Grant. Hope is an AEA Stage Manager, and served as The Free Theatre’s first Production Manager for our first three years. She is currently the literary manager at Bay Street Theatre, and holds a Master’s in Writing for Stage and Screen (Lesley University) and a Master’s in Education (Loyola University).