Yearly Archives: 2017

18 posts

Don Gabenski: $3,529

Financial-aid recipient: Don Gabenski has been performing for 15 years with Phamaly Theatre Company, which exists to provide performance opportunities to actors with disabilities, and more recently Spoke N Motion, Denver’s only fully integrated dance company. Phamaly highlights have included playing the patriarch Jacob in “Joseph and Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” […]

Nancy Warner: $3,932

Financial-aid recipient: Nancy Warner has been a dresser, backstage crew member and faithful volunteer for Phamaly Theatre Company for many years, most recently as a show-runner for Phamaly’s “Vox Phamilia: Under Construction” at the Community College of Aurora. For nearly 30 years, Phamly has existed to provide performance and backstage […]

Archie Villeda: $8,450

  Financial-aid recipient: Actor Archie Villeda is a local actor who most recently appeared in Su Teatro’s Dona Rositas Jalapeno Kitchen in 2015. Other titles include Ludlow: El Grito de Las Minas in 20914 and the class comedy La Carpa Aztlan Presents: I Don’t Speak English Only in 2012 (pictured […]

Mark Shonsey: $7,464

Blessings of childbirth have come with medical hardships for Mark and Shauna Shonsey, but the DAF has been there to help with the bills Financial-aid recipient: Funnyman Mark Shonsey has been an an actor in the Denver theatre and improv-comedy communities since 2003. The graduate of John F. Kennedy High […]

Paul and Amanda Hartman: $2,950

Financial-aid recipient: Paul Hartman and his wife, Amanda, are both longtime members of the local theatre community. Paul is a musician who has playing in pits from the Midtown Ats Center Arts Center in Fort Collins to the Candelight Dinner Theater in Johnstown to Performance Now in Lakewood to more. […]

Greg Alan West: Transport

Financial-aid recipient: Greg Alan West is a longtime actor and costumer in the Colorado theatre community whose notable roles have included the one-man epic I Am My Own Wife and Lucien in The Boys Next Door for Firehouse Theatre Company; Peter Quince in A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Colorado […]

Carol Kelly: $1,499

Financial-aid recipient: For 18 years, Carol Kelly was the Hair and Makeup Coordinator for Phamaly, the acclaimed Denver theatre company that creates performance opportunities for actors with disabilities. Most recently, she worked on Cabaret at the Denver Center’s Space Theatre. Her medical story: Carol has been put on a two-week […]

Daniel Perkins: $10,787

Financial-aid recipient: Daniel Perkins, known in your theatre programs as DP Perkins, came to Colorado in 1980 to do a show at the Heritage Square Opera House, and stayed. He was part of a brigade that piled into a car and drove to Golden after the Goldenrod Showboat in St. […]

Norrell Moore: $4,785

Financial-aid recipient: Norrell Moore has been regularly performing in the local theatre community since 2012, when she played Vivienne Kensington and Rachel Jackson in high-profile, back-to-back productions of Legally Blonde The Musical at the Arvada Center and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson at the Aurora Fox. Major roles that followed included […]

Emily K. Harrison: $1,520

Financial aid recipient: Actor and producer Emily K. Harrison is the founder of the now 12-year old, intentionally lower-cased square product theatre. She just completed a controversial turn playing child beauty queen and murder victim JonBenét Ramsey in House of Gold, performed in Ramsey’s hometown of Boulder. Joanne Ostrow of […]

Christopher Tye: $2,500

Financial aid recipient: Adrianna Tye is the mother of actor Christopher Tye, who appeared as Curtis Taylor Jr. in Ignite Theatre’s production of “Dreamgirls” in 2014-15 at the Aurora Fox. Christopher died without warning on July 20, his birthday. He was 36. “He died too young and without warning or signs,” […]

Abner Genece

Abner Genece: $10,859

Denver Actors Fund helps actor with dental emergency after previous, life-threatening freeway collision Financial aid recipient: Actor Abner Genece is the co-writer and assistant director of Benchmark Theatre’s world-premiere devised work, “Elephant,” which imagines the horribly deformed archetype David Merrick as a contemporary Black Man who is discovered in a […]

Katherine Paynter: $4,290

Financial aid recipient: Katherine Paynter is an actor who just performed in Performance Now Theatre Company’s “The Wedding Singer,” which closed Sunday. Paynter, who hails from Minnesota, studied theatre arts through a dual-college program within both Minnesota State and North Dakota State universities. She is now a Denver-based flight attendant […]

Christopher Dyer

Christopher Dyer, a longtime executive with the Denver-based premium cable TV network Starz/Lionsgate, has been unanimoulsy appointed to the Denver Actors Fund Board of Directors, President Will Barnette has announced. The 4-year-old Denver Actors Fund makes financial and practical assistance available to members of the Colorado theatre community facing situational […]

Sasha Fisher: $4,522

Financial aid recipient: Sasha Fisher, recipient of two London Time Out Critics’ Choice Awards for her work in classical theatre, is an instructor in the education department of the Arvada Center, where she teaches master classes, coordinates a World War I humanities project and conducts four-week salons in conjunction with […]