Zelda Dean has been in the arts for over 45 years and has directed and produced over 140 theatre productions. She was founder and Artistic Director of Calgary’s first Jewish Theatre Company, providing a platform for artists both within and outside of the Jewish community, breaking down many barriers of the day. In 2014 she founded BEMA Productions in Victoria with a mission of producing thought-provoking, passionate, and entertaining plays that speak to the universal human condition, embrace the society at large and celebrate the distinctive voice and social vision that are part of the Jewish experience and cultural legacy. The playwright Wendy Kout, has given Ms Dean the Western Canada rights to mount the cutting-edge Holocaust educational play SURVIVORS. She directed and presented a nine- performance pilot tour to middle and secondary schools resulting in reaching more than 1,100 students and 500 adults in the Victoria, BC area.
Frances Grunberg has extensive experience working on child, youth, and family issues in British Columbia as a practitioner, educator, curriculum developer, consultant and advocate since 1974. She is Faculty Emerita at Langara College where she taught social work for 18 years. She is an expert in program development, direct service delivery, clinical intervention and treatment with children, youth and families. Ms. Grunberg represented the Victoria Shoah Project at the Ministry of Education’s Anti-Racism Roundtable.
Peter J. Nadler is a retired Victoria BC lawyer, mediator and arbitrator. He has extensive experience in the entertainment industry, and is a professional actor with film and T.V. and stand-up comedy credits. He was Vice President of The Green Thumb theatre for young People, Member of the Virtual Stage Theatre Society, is a member of Victoria Shoah Project (memorializing the Holocaust) and is V.P. of Victoria Holocaust Theatre Production Society which produces the Survivors Play.
Dr. April Nowell is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Victoria. Being a board member of the Holocaust Theater Production Society brings together her passion for theater and for community advocacy and education. She currently serves as the Vice President of Kolot Mayim Reform Temple and on the Board of Jewish Family Services of Vancouver Island and is a member of the Network of Engaged Canadian Academics. Previously, she had the pleasure of serving on the adjudication committee for the Victoria Jewish International Film Festival and as a member of the Victoria Shoah Project.
Isa Milman is an award-winning author and the daughter of Holocaust survivors from Poland. She came with her family as refugees to the United States in 1950, and immigrated to Canada in 1975. Her life in Canada is neatly divided between twenty-one years in Montreal, and the last twenty-eight years in Victoria, BC. Isa is the author of three full collections of poetry—Something Small to Carry Home (2012), Prairie Kaddish (2008) and Between the Doorposts (2004)—and a three-time winner of the Helen & Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Award, whose 2012 jury called her “a foremost Canadian writer of Jewish themes.” Her latest book, Afterlight: In Search of Poetry, History and Home, published by Heritage House in 2021, was selected a finalist for memoir by the National Jewish Book Awards in New York. Her professional life has encompassed occupational therapy practice, university teaching, entrepreneurship, writing and art-making. For more, visit www. isamilman.com