Born and raised in High Point, North Carolina, Martha has had a lifelong connection to Shakespeare. She was a member of the 1979 and 1995 Main Stage acting companies and the1995 GlobeWorks touring company at The North Carolina Shakespeare Festival (NCSF). She toured internationally in 1994 with The Shenandoah Shakespeare Express and directed for them at their new home, The American ShakespeareCenter in Staunton, VA in 2005.
Most recently, with NCSF, Martha has created and implemented new education programming: Shakespeare To Go (a touring company performing 60-minute versions of Shakespeare’s plays), Hands OnShakespeare (a workshop designed to assist educators in bringing Shakespeare alive as performance in their classrooms), and Apprentice Company for Training (Shakespeare training for young people). In 2010, Martha will develop for NCSF an original performance project based around the Mendenhall Plantation, a Quaker homestead built in 1811 in Jamestown, NC.
From 1997 to 2007, Martha taught high school English and Theatre in Charlottesville, VA. She also developed and taught a summer Shakespeare program for youth ages 8 to 18. Since 2007, she has developed and taught Shakespeare and theatre classes for youth of all ages.
Martha initiated her freelance work as a theatre artist in 1997, directing, writing, and acting in projects with the Charlottesville theatre company Foolery (1997-2004), which toured to the 1997 Festival Fringe in Edinburgh, Scotland, where it received the BBC’s “Most Innovative” award. During this time, Martha also trained and performed with the Washington, DC company, Theatre Du Jour.
In 2005, also in Charlottesville, she formed The PerformersExchange Project (PEP) – an organization dedicated to producing community-inclusive performance events and providing touring assistance to national and international performers. With PEP, she has hosted the internationally renowned DAH Theatre in 2005, and produced, directed and wrote scripts for two city-wide arts carnivals in the summers of 2006 and 2007. In December 2009, PEP premiered its first evening-length original performance, Our American Ann Sisters,based on the lives of the nineteenth-century Peabody Sisters.
photo credit: Scott Crowder
