About Us

ABOUT ENCOREMICHIGAN.COM:

EncoreMichigan.com is a new, Web-based publication focused on Michigan's professional theater industry. It is the state's premier source for free, up-to-the-minute news and information about this often-ignored segment of the arts community.

Designed as a one-stop shop for consumers, industry professionals and others with an interest in the performing arts, EncoreMichigan.com is updated daily and packed with informative interviews, insightful reviews, comprehensive show listings, thoughtful commentary, audition notices, original podcasts, special offers and much, much more.

Original content is created by a dedicated team of veteran freelance journalists and theater professionals. In addition to material created exclusively for EncoreMichigan.com, links are also provided to reviews and stories of interest that appear in other local and national publications. Together, this makes EncoreMichigan.com the most complete source for professional theater news in Michigan.

EncoreMichigan.com also produces:

• Curtain's Up – a free, twice-weekly e-newsletter that summarizes the latest professional theater news, with special readership polls and ticket discounts offered by area theaters;
  
• Encore LIVE – a free podcast series that examines issues facing Michigan's professional theater industry and its artists in the 21st century; and
  
• This Week Onstage – Barb Coven-Ellis' longtime e-newsletter filled with audition news, professional development information and other important notes for industry insiders.

EncoreMichigan.com is a partnership between Livonia, Michigan-based Pride Source Media Group and originator Donald V. Calamia, PSMG's highly-regarded theater and arts editor.

ABOUT PRIDE SOURCE MEDIA GROUP:

Co-Publishers Susan Horowitz and Jan Stevenson founded Pride Source Media Group in 1993. The company has grown to a full time staff of 15 and a freelance network of over 50 writers and distributors. PSMG is committed to providing the public with excellent news coverage, thoughtful analysis, complete entertainment coverage, event listings and forums through which opinions on timely topics can be thoroughly discussed and debated. The company's portfolio of publications includes Between The Lines weekly newspaper, Pridesource.com, Michigan Pride Source Directory, the BTL Digest and EncoreMichigan.com.

Stevenson holds a master's degree in music performance from Yale University, and was a professional musician in and around New York for five years after graduation. Horowitz was the founder and first executive director of the New Festival, New York's annual gay and lesbian film festival, a position she held from 1989 to 1993. Under her leadership, the Film Festival grew to become one of the largest gay and lesbian film festivals in the world.

For information about PSMG, call Jan Stevenson at 734-293-7200, ext. 22.

ABOUT DONALD V. CALAMIA:

As a theater and education major at Mercy College of Detroit, Donald V. Calamia learned an important life-lesson: A career as a professional actor in Detroit in the mid-1970s was not all it was cracked up to be!

However, life as a theater executive proved otherwise.

After serving stints as public relations director, box office manager, administrative director and producer with two local professional theater companies in the mid-to-late 70s, Calamia co-founded Crossroads Productions, Ltd., a nationally recognized, award-winning touring educational theater company, and served as its executive director for 14 years. When fate took him down yet another path in 1993, it was decided to go out on a high note, and the company quietly lowered the curtain for the last time.

In the meantime, Calamia found an outlet for his journalistic talents: From late 1979 through August 1982 he worked as a freelance writer for the Observer & Eccentric Newspapers for which he wrote feature stories and served as a theater critic. He has also written or co-authored a half dozen professionally-produced plays that address such issues as divorce, AIDS and substance abuse. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, they played to tens of thousands of young people all across Michigan.

Calamia currently serves as theater and arts editor for Pride Source Media Group, publishers of Between The Lines, for which he created The Wilde Awards, a "must attend" annual event at Detroit's Gem Theatre that honors the work produced by Michigan's professional theater companies. He is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists and the American Theatre Critics Association.

EDITORIAL TEAM

Barbara Coven-Ellis is a local professional actress. She has appeared on just about every Equity stage in Southeast Michigan as well as in numerous commercials and industrial films. In her current guise as a member of EncoreMichigan.com, she is a tireless "cheerleader" and promoter of the theater arts. Since she and her husband Paul Hopper are full time actors, her tireless promotion of the arts is needless to say, a bit self serving, but considering the current state of arts funding, profoundly necessary. She urges you all to go, sit in the dark surrounded by friends and strangers, and experience the wonderful communal experience that is live theater.

CONTRIBUTORS

D. A. (David Allen) Blackburn is a life-long musician, patron and participant in the performing arts. A 1998 Michigan State Vocal Music Association (MSVMA) Youth Arts Finalist with the Walled Lake Western Chamber Singers, he has performed choral and chamber music extensively, touring much of the United States, Canada and Great Britain. In 1998 and 1999 Blackburn contributed his baritone to the MSVMA State Men's Honors Choir. Throughout his academic career, Mr. Blackburn studied theater, stagecraft, film and literature, and regularly participated in theatrical productions as both a performer and a stagehand. After completing a bachel's degree in journalism and public relations at Madonna University, he turned his focus to the administration of the arts, becoming the company publicist for Michigan Opera Theatre and the Detroit Opera House. Here, Blackburn served as editor of BRAVO Magazine, and oversaw promotion of the company's opera and dance productions, including the world premiere of Richard Danielpour's opera, Margaret Garner. After departing Michigan Opera Theatre to focus more energy on his writing, Blackburn became an associate critic for Between The Lines in February of 2007.

While growing up in Brighton, Michigan, Jenn McKee appeared as a maid in Agatha Christie's The Hollow and as one of the Major General's many daughters in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance. She then decided to spare the world from her, ahem, "acting" and pursue writing about theater instead. She wrote her first theater reviews for The Michigan Daily while a student at U-M, and continued to write freelance arts articles for local newspapers while earning an MA in English at University of Georgia, and then an MFA in creative writing at Penn State University. She's published a poem (that's right, one) and a handful of short stories in literary journals, and one of her stories, "Under the Influence," was selected by Joyce Carol Oates for inclusion in the anthology, Best New American Voices 2003. Currently, she's the staff theater critic/arts writer for AnnArbor.com, and she lives in Farmington with her lovely husband Joe and daughter Lily.