Niki Selken (Nicole) M.F.A. is an experimental theater director/performer/playwright living in San Francisco.She uses original text, multi instrument music, puppetry, and dance to create vibrant, humorous, and daring works. Niki has performed, directed and studied internationally. She performed and acted as lighting designer for the dance company, Ragesties at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2002, she founded the UK based performance company CAT productions, and studied acting and lighting design at the Drama department of the University of Birmingham, England. She has also performed and/or worked with Shakespeare Santa Cruz, The San Jose Stage Company, The The Erika Shuch Performance Project at the Yerba Buena Center for Performing Arts, Crash Cabaret at the Roxy Theater, Fulbright awarded video artist Nick Fox-Gieg, and with her band Cosmic Star who have performed throughout the Bay Area. She has recently co-founded the theater company and performance space, Ko Labs, which presented The Endless Frontier at the 2008 San Francisco Fringe Festival and 2009 Women on the Way Festival. Check out her side projects too: the first experimental cat art web blog: WTF Kitty, and her monthly DJ night, Art. House. Rock.

Alan W. Holt, Ko-Director

Alan Holt graduated from New College of California in 2007 with a degree in writing, interested at the time primarily with speculative fiction and journalism. In April of 2008 Alan started a two-year tenure as the Executive Director of the Roxie Theater in San Francisco. There he developed a sense for quality art that creates community and fosters dialogue, as well as the belief that good storytelling is fundamental to exploring and understanding the human condition. Alan worked with Ko Labs on both in a two-month long workshop, “Making Our Work,” as well as a site-specific movement piece called, Moving Through Syzygryd, performed at Burning Man 2010. In 2009 he performed in and choreographed stage combat for the musical, Forever and a Day (a James Bond parody) during its run at The Garage, as well as Life on Lex, a short film by local SF filmmaker Erin Coker. His written work has been published in 'The BayView National Black Newspaper.'

Zack, Collaborator, Ko-Director

ZACK is a performer, director and teacher/trainer, whose work is informed by expansive experience in all aspects of performance including acting, choreography, theory, production, management and collaboration. Last seen onstage as Rodger in “The Endless Frontier,” Zack is perhaps best known to Bay Area audiences for his living room performances of Wallace Shawn's "The Fever." He most recently directed Megan Terry's "Keep Tightly Closed in a Cool Dry Place" for The Free Agents at Mama Calizo's Voice Factory. Zack has created/directed more than forty productions, and served as Artistic Director for the SF-based experimental theater company Common Cultural Practice for several years before pursuing his doctorate at Stanford University. His original performance works have been presented in New York, Paris, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and he has performed professionally in works by Meredith Monk, Anne Bogart, Ping Chong, The Drawing Legion and Deborah Slater Dance Theater. Zack has taught at Bennington College, Stanford University, San Francisco State University, and the Experimental Performance Institute at the ill-fated New College of California, and is a certified teacher of NIA (Neuro-Muscular Integrative Activity).

Julie "Maya" Panda, Kollaborator

Julie is an Actress, Director, Dancer, Poet, Hypnotist and Dork. She is best known for her award winning avant-absurdist playwriting of, "The Conversation Piece, which was later revised as "Beatrice and Virgil in Paradise" at the San Francisco Film Festival to smiling reviews. She is a Theatre Arts Alumni of San Francisco State University, and has served as director for 10 fabulous theatrical productions and has been a performer in approximately 30 dance, film and theatre shows where she has played such roles as Miranda in “Tempest” and Honey in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” Experimental theatre is her true passion and she is very proud to be a member of this innovative and inspiring company. To learn more about Julie’s Hypnotherapy practice visit blissfulhypnosis.com.

Justina Kochansky, Kollaborator

Justina Kochansky graduated with a degree in puppetry after writing the curriculum for it herself. She studied shadow puppetry
in Bali through a program offered by Dell'Arte. While most of her puppet shows took place on the East Coast, you can see some current vignettes at her web comic, articulatematter.com.

Danielle Sublett, Kollaborator
Danielle Sublett enjoys comparing, contrasting and researching all things discarded, antiquated, outdated and archaic. She also enjoys gluing them together.

Kasey Smith, Design
Kasey Smith is an installation/performance artist who lives and works in San Francisco. She graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2003 with a degree in fine art. After utilizing textiles and clothing in her work for several years, she has now branched out into costume design as a new way to address issues in her work. She is currently a member of the arts collective Cadresquad and is working on several performance installations involving historic San Francisco landmarks.

Past Company Members

Helene Vosters, Kollaborator

Helene Vosters M.A., M.F.A. is a performer, activist and educator whose aesthetic and political sensibilities were forged on the radical landscape of the Canadian Prairies—where big skies collided with a necessary and pragmatic collectivity to create a love for a language of spatial and ensemble relationships. In addition to her ongoing participation in numerous collaborative performance endeavors, Helene has written, directed and performed in several original works—including Green, Eve’s Trespass and Rosaceae—activist allegories in the form of absurdist physical comedies that explore questions of collectivity, passion, pleasure, sin, alienation, death and war. Helene’s current performance and research explorations are focused on awakening the transformative power of collective grief through public performance intervention.Helene served for three years on the core faculty at the Tamalpa Institute, was Co-Director of New College of California’s Activism and Social Change program for five years and currently teaches at the California Institute of Integral Studies in their Undergraduate Studies program and their Masters in Somatic Psychology. 

Danielle Gellis, Kollaborator

Gabriel Gilder, Musician
Gabriel Gilder is a San Francisco-based musician, graphic designer, and video artist. He graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz with a fine arts major focusing on video and installation. His work is often interdisciplinary, and integrates a diverse range of influences, from Bollywood to Brian Eno to postmodern architecture to Japanese stickers. He strives to blend elegance, mystery, and humor to surprise and delight his audience.

Ben Wilkinson, Musician
Ben Wilkinson landed in San Francisco in 1998. He moved across an endless frontier from New York to pursue a life writing and performing music. Like so many stories from the dot com era, Ben's music swiftly took a backseat to his general economic and human survival. His work over the last decade has included composing documentary film soundtracks, recording a solo album in Portland, OR (yet to be released), and acquiring a variety of unique instruments from around the world. After 23 years of honing his own unique guitar sound, he will be the first to admit that he "should have taken lessons," back in the 1980's.  

David Manning, Musician
David Manning is a failed classical violinist who aspires to be a washed up rock violinist.  David is available to play birthday parties and bar mitzvahs for children whose parents love them, but don't like them.  Check out www.myspace.com/davidJmanning.

Danielle Gellis has been performing her entire life. As a child and teenager, some of her favorite roles included Lucy in "You're a Good Man Charlie Brown", Miss Hannigan in "Annie", a fairy in "A Midsummer Night's Dream", and being chosen for the All-State Show at the California convention of the International Thespian Society. In college, Danielle fulfilled a lifelong dream of singing the natinal anthem at a major league baseball game, as part of the UC Davis Lounge Lizards a capella group.
   More recently, she enjoys spinning fire, singing songs, doing skits, and telling campfire stories to youth as a professional naturalist and backpacking trip leader. She is also very excited to be a part of the Ko Labs company.

Tera Kilbride, Performer

Tera Kilbride is a performer, writer and experimental theatre maker. She uses original text, physical characterization, and occasionally song or dance to create surreal, absurdist or humorous psychological/philosophical work. Tera training ranges from various styles of acting, physical theatre, dance, classical voice, viewpoints, improvisation and writing. Her past performing experience ranges from professional musical theatre to spending three years in the Minneapolis/St.Paul area working as an actor on the stage most notably with Minneapolis Fringe Festival 2005, Nimbus Theatre and Mainly Me Productions. She also studied improvisation and worked in commercial film and several independent film roles.Her original pieces 'Box Scene/Train Scene' and 'Searching for Water Near the End of Apocalypse' premiered in the Faultline Festival at the EPI this past August 2007.
In SF, she was proud to be involved both administratively as well as technically with CounterPULSE, a community-based and hybrid performing arts organization.
Her original piece 'An Astronaut's Guide to Shooting Stars' premiered at 975 Howard in San Francisco as part of the RAW Artist in Residence Program this past March (directed by Niki Selken with additional support from Ko Labs, SF.)
Upon relocating back to Minneapolis, Tera has had the pleasure of being involved in Bedlam Theatre's 10 minute play Festival and studying under Dominuqe Serrand of Theatre de la Juene Lune. She is interested in performing in original works and working collaboratively.