Our Board Members
Our board includes people who’ve experienced homelessness or incarceration or who regularly interact with these populations. Every one of our board members believe that great art is an indispensable and democratic right to which everyone should have access no matter where they are.
ROB HARRISON
Board President
Senor CRM Systems Analyst, Armanio LLP
Residence: Portland, OR
PATRICK WALSH
Board Secretary
Theatre Director/Social Justice Advocate
Residence: Milwaukie, OR
JERMAINE MALONE
Board Member
Returned Citizen/Musician
Residence: Portland, OR
PAUL SUSI
Board Member
Homeless Shelter Resource Manager
Residence: Portland, OR
SUSAN RUSSELL
Board Member
Assistant Federal Public Defender: District of Oregon
Residence: Portland, OR
MOLLY STOWE
Board Member
Public School Teacher
Residence: Tigard, OR
Our Collaborators
ANNA FRITZ is a Portland-based cellist, singer, songwriter, and composer. Her background includes a rigorous classical training, culminating as a student of Uri Vardi at the University of Wisconsin Madison, and seven years of national touring with Portland Cello Project. She records regularly with rock bands like The Decemberists and My Morning Jacket and tours as a solo folksinging cellist. Anna’s original songs are used as political anthems and intimate prayers, touching on themes of colonization, climate change, and connection with the natural world. As a Quaker with a music ministry, Anna leads programs for spiritual communities and as a composer, works with theater productions in prisons in Oregon. She wrote the original score for solo cello for the Northwest Classical Theater Collaborative production of An Iliad.
PAUL SUSI is a theater artist, a social services professional, an educator, and a community activist, born and raised in Portland, Oregon. Paul has worked as a counselor and an educator at several Portland-area nonprofit organizations serving houseless, recovering, post-incarcerated and adjudicated adult and youth populations, including Clackamas County Juvenile Department’s Restorative Justice Division,New Avenues for Youth, Janus Youth Programs, DePaul Treatment Centers, Hooper Detox, Transition Projects, and PlayWrite, Inc. Paul serves as Co-Chair of the Multnomah County Cultural Coalition, the grass-roots re-granting arm of the Oregon Cultural trust, and a Conversation Project Facilitator for Oregon Humanities, leading the discussion, “Does Higher Education Matter?”, in community and cultural centers throughout Oregon. Additionally he serves as the Chair of the Board of Directors for Portland Actors Ensemble / Shakespeare in the Parks as well as the Manager of the River District Navigation Center for Transition Projects.
Our Executive Artistic Director
Patrick Walsh is a theatre director and producer who believes in the power of language, art, and community to change lives.
In all of my work as a director, it is always my goal to take the disparate elements that are at my disposal and create a cohesive community. I want this to occur during the design process and in the rehearsal room, as well as during all performances. In today’s tumultuous society this is how I view my role as an artist: as someone who, through the creation of something truthful and beautiful, can bring people of differing backgrounds together and cause them to see the world that we live in and the people around them in a slightly different light.
Only through the prism of artistic expression can people be reminded of their universal similarities, instead of focusing on their paltry differences. Today as a society we seem to be more fractured by belief and technology than ever before. At this time, we all need a place to go to be reminded that we are part of a larger conglomerate than ourselves. This is the power of the artist; to create not only art, but also community around that touchstone.
I am ecstatic to lead NCTC in its important mission to knit together disparate rooms across Oregon and bring great art to those who don’t have it and truly need it.