Theatre

Maria Broom

Although nationally known as an actress for her recurring roles in HBO’s The Wire and The Corner, Maria Broom is also a storyteller and dancer with more than 40 years of experience performing and teaching in the United States and across the globe.

She is a Fulbright scholar and former news reporter for the ABC affiliates in Miami and Baltimore. Broom has received many awards and honors, including the Eubie Blake Award, the Sarah’s Circle Award, and the 2004 Governor’s Arts Award for Individual Artist. In 2007, she was named Artist of the Year by Young Audiences of Maryland, Inc.

Broom is also much requested as a speaker and presenter. With a background in yoga, meditation, Homa therapy, and dance therapy, she conducts staff retreats, workshops, and weekly classes that help people to release stress and feel at peace. She was a consultant for Maryland Public Television’s Campaign for Love and Forgiveness, sponsored by Fetzer Institute. She also received an Open Society Institute community fellowship grant to establish a unique mentoring program in City Schools and beyond, called the Dance Girls of Baltimore.

Lynne Childress

Lynne Streeter Childress is founding artistic director of Building Better People Productions, a theater for young audiences’ company in Annapolis, MD. Her 28-year career in professional theater includes performing at the Kennedy Center, Arena Stage and Adventure Theatre, and teaching for institutions like the Folger Shakespeare Library. After serving as a guest teacher at BSA last year, she is excited to be part of the theatre faculty this year. Lynne has seen firsthand how theatre can communicate the most important things in the clearest and most interesting of ways, especially to young people. She lives in Annapolis, MD with her husband and son.

Rahzé Cheatham

As a performer of vocal music, Rahzé Cheatham is described as having the ability to “move to tears”, and is praised as “wonderfully sensitive” with “crystalline diction” and a strong foundation in music, theatre art, and dance applications in contemporary classical music across both concert and operatic repertoire. As an arts educator, they host a private voice studio of beginner, intermediate, and advanced students across multiple genres.

Through a holistic approach to musical and artistic development, Rahzé not only cultivates technical proficiency but also fosters a deep understanding of the interconnectedness between music, the body, expressive communication, and global community.

Rahzé’s students have appeared in concert, opera, and musical theatre productions locally and nationally, including at Baltimore’s Center Stage, Hippodrome Theatre, John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Millennium Stage, the Lyric Baltimore, Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, M&T Bank Exchange at the France-Merrick Performing Arts Center, and more. Matriculating high school students have been accepted into numerous summer festivals, such as the Berklee College of Music Aspire: Five-Week Music Performance Intensive, Maryland Opera Camp, and college/conservatory voice programs at AMDA College of Performing Arts (Los Angeles), the American Musical the Performing Arts and Dramatic Academy (New York) Cal Arts, New York University, and Pace University.

Denise Diggs

Denise Diggs has acted professionally for decades. She played MaMa Moja in the play “In The Red and Brown Water” by Terell McCraney at Studio Theatre in Washington, DC. Other theatre credits include performances at Center Stage, Everyman Theatre, Actor’s Ensemble, The Baltimore Shakespeare Theatre, Olney Theatre, Arena Stage (D.C.), Round House Theatre, Theatre of the First Amendment, and the La Jolla Theatre in San Diego. Diggs received the 1998 Maryland Arts Council Individual Artist Award for her work as an actor, teacher, and promoter of various arts programs throughout Maryland. Her one-person show on Winnie Mandela, which she wrote and performed at the Theatre Project, also contributed to this prestigious award. Diggs has had the honor of teaching voice and speech at the Baltimore School for the Arts since 1981. She has also taught acting in their TWIGS program and was the coordinator of several outreach programs. She is presently teaching voice and acting at the Studio Theatre Acting Conservatory (DC), voice with acting emphasis at Duke Ellington School of the Arts (DC), and is the private instructor for various professionals throughout the Baltimore/Washington area. Her television credits include recurring roles on the Emmy Award-winning Homicide: Life on the Streets, The Corner, and most recently, The Wire. Diggs studied Theatre Arts at Towson University and the Shakespeare Theatre in DC.

Anita Horwath

Anita Horwath holds a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education and has taught creative drama for TWIGS for the past 20 years. She also teaches an after-school drama program for Roland Park Country School. She directs Ages on Stages, an intergenerational improvisational group that includes the BSA sophomores. The group performs in senior centers and high schools around the city.

Kaya Vision Potler ’12

Kaya is a multi-faceted performing artist. Kaya has been a part of the BSA family since 2006 when they were in TWIGS, graduated from the BSA acting department in 2012, and came back to BSA to teach TWIGS in 2017 and began teaching in the Theatre Department in 2019. Having graduated from Towson University with a BFA in Acting, Kaya has maintained their local roots having performed with notable Baltimore theatre companies such as Single Carrot, Submersive Productions, Center Stage, and ACME Corporation. Kaya is currently a company member with the ACME Corporation. While Kaya is a Voice teacher for the Acting department, their passions lie in merging both the voice and the body in all forms of performing arts, specifically in poetic language.

Paul Reisman

Paul Reisman is a professional actor, director, and playwright. Locally, his work has been seen at the Kennedy Center, Shakespeare Theatre Company, Taffety Punk, dog&ponydc, Flying V, Spooky Action Theatre, Best Medicine Rep, We Happy Few, and others. Regionally, at venues including the American Shakespeare Center, Shakespeare Theatre of NJ, 12 Miles West, TheatreFest, and the American Globe Theatre. His voice can be heard on many audiobooks for GraphicAudio.  He is also a founding member and former producing artistic director of Faction of Fools – DC’s award-winning Commedia dell’Arte company.

As an educator, Paul has been on faculty at Shepherd University, and been a guest artist in residence at University of Nebraska, Knox College, and Metropolitan School of the Arts, among others.  He has taught for the Smithsonian, Shakespeare Theatre Company, Imagination Stage, ETC, Traveling Players Ensemble, and Faction of Fools, among others. He has trained extensively in physical theatre, Lecoq, clown, and Commedia under Christopher Bayes, Dody DiSanto, Matthew R. Wilson, and Maestro Antonio Fava. He has an M.F.A. from the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Academy for Classical Acting at the George Washington University and a B.F.A. from Montclair State University.

Bernard Shropshire

Bernard Shropshire left the Baltimore School for the Arts with the graduating class of 1988 – after being awarded that year’s Pearlstone Scholarship. After graduating from the Catholic University of America’s Drama Department, he landed in NYC where he spent the next two decades living the thespian life, acting and directing, while continually training and living his dream. In the Big Apple, he studied at the HB Studio & Broadway Dance Center, as well as toured the tristate, performing with companies such as the Live Theater Gang (performing at venues such as NY Comedy Club and The Producers’ Club) and Theatre Garden, LTD (performing annual educational dramas and musicals for numerous elementary and middle schools).

After leaving Baltimore more than thirty years ago, he is thrilled to finally return to the BSA as its newest theatre program manager and TWIGS acting instructor. He has lived his dream and looks forward to helping BSA’s next generation of thespian artists nurture their artistic dreams.

Tony Tsendeas

Kaya is a multi-faceted performing artist. Kaya has been a part of the BSA family since 2006 when they were in TWIGS, graduated from the BSA acting department in 2012, and came back to BSA to teach TWIGS in 2017 and began teac

Tony Tsendeas is a core acting instructor at The Baltimore School for the Arts.  He is the former Artistic Director of Action Theater; named Baltimore’s Best Theater by Baltimore Magazine, and featured in national theater publications American Theater Magazine and The Drama Review.   

Action theater’s initial production of David Mamet’s American Buffalo was met with tremendous critical enthusiasm.  The News American’s Scott Fosdick enthused that Action was “…the type of company that has reshaped the American Theater…go see it, at the least you will see an excellent production of a hard-hitting play, whether or not you’ve seen theater history remains to be seen.”   Tony directed Beckett’s Happy Days (later moved to Barnard College for a Beckett Festival), The Water Engine by David Mamet, Albee’s American Dream – named Best Production by the Baltimore City Paper, The Madman and the Nun by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, and I Married a Fly by company member Thomas E. Cole.  For many years, Action Theater was in residence at The Baltimore Theater project and presented many productions at this venerable venue.

Tony conceived and directed, BeckettLand .  This collection of short dramatic pieces by Samuel Beckett was set in a ‘Ghost Carnival’ or ‘Bemusement Park’.  Action presented BeckettLand at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The show was a tremendous hit. London Stage Magazine called the production, “A marvelous production and a must for all Beckett Fans.”  Scotland’s largest daily paper, The Scotsman opined that the show was “A boldly conceived and memorably luminous production”.  BeckettLand earned the company representation by renowned European Impresario, Hans de Visser who booked a multi-city tour for the company in The Netherlands.

Tony then directed Action company member Robb Bauer’s adaptation of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.  Presented at Goucher College as part of the company’s residency there, this multi-media, trip-hop, dark clown show phantasmagoria was named best production of the year by The Baltimore City Paper.  This was the 2nd time a show directed by Tony earned this distinction; the first being Action Theater’s production of Edward Albee’s The American Dream. 

For The Clown Theater troupe – Theatrics, Tony directed Circus Berserkus at Wolf Trap, Café Quikus for The Theater by the Sea and Payatz! at Roundhouse Theater in DC and The Baltimore Theater Project.   For The Baltimore Shakespeare Festival, Tony directed Macbeth, Othello, Julius Caesar and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. At Rep Stage, Tony directed I Am My Own Wife and Wittenberg by David Davelos, for which Tony was nominated for a Helen Hayes award as best director.

As a stage actor Tony has played a wide variety of roles in a broad array of theaters and venues in the US and abroad, including: Action Theater, Center Stage, The Lyric, The Baltimore Shakespeare Festival, The Edinburgh Fringe, Scena Theater, The Meyerhoff, Theater J, Woolly Mammoth Theater, Denver’s The Verizon Center, and Verizon Hall in Philadelphia and most city theaters in The Netherlands.  Roles assailed at these venues include Teach (American Buffalo), Chebutykin (The Three Sisters), Beethoven (CSI:Beethoven), Sigmund Freud (Analyze This), Bam (What Where – BeckettLand), Claudius (Hamlet), Benedick (Much Ado About Nothing), Buckinham (Richard III).  Tony was formerly actor-in-residence at The Baltimore Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum and his one man show – The Poe Show has toured extensively.  

Tony’s voice has graced Audible and he has narrated shows for The Discovery Channel, The History Channel and The Learning Channel.   Film work includes the features, Her Alibi, The Fall from Paradise, Television: HBO’s The Wire, HBO’s Autopsy and NBC’s Homicide: Life on the Streets, The learning Channel’s Great Books Series,  

While writing and directing Look Alive Baltimore 2, for the City of Baltimore, Mr. Tsendeas cast Tony award winning actress Trazana Beverly as civil rights icon Lilly Carrol Jackson.  Out of this work, mutual respect and friendship evolved.  Mr. Tsendeas’ first exposure to BSA came as a substitute teacher for Trazana.  When Trazana prepared to leave BSA, she asked Tony to take over her classes; Donald Hicken agreed and thus began a long and productive artistic and educational journey.

hing in the Theatre Department in 2019. Having graduated from Towson University with a BFA in Acting, Kaya has maintained their local roots having performed with notable Baltimore theatre companies such as Single Carrot, Submersive Productions, Center Stage, and ACME Corporation. Kaya is currently a company member with the ACME Corporation. While Kaya is a Voice teacher for the Acting department, their passions lie in merging both the voice and the body in all forms of performing arts, specifically in poetic language.