Katie Rose Clarke & Ron Song Destro

Teaches at New York Botanical Garden

Katie Rose Clarke is an acclaimed young actress and singer who has starred on Broadway as Glinda in Wicked, Clara in The Light in the Piazza at Lincoln Center and on PBS, and Babe in The Pajama Game opposite Harry Connick, Jr. She has also performed cabaret at 54 Below.

Ron Song Destro is a Kennedy Center award-winning playwright, as well as an actor, director and teacher. He is the founding director of the non-profit Oxford Shakespeare Company, recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts grant and has received critical acclaim for his Shakespeare productions, as well as for his own play Hiroshima, a collaboration with Yoko Ono, which won the 1997 Kennedy Center New American Play Award. He has also taught acting for dancers at the Joffrey Ballet School. He has trained, worked and taught with leading artists of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and the Shanghai Opera Theatre. His mentors include John Houseman, Kristin Linklater, Cicely Berry and John Barton, with whom he has studied privately. He has directed more than 25 Shakespeare plays presented in New York, London and Stratford-upon-Avon. And he was a teacher of Katie Rose Clarke.