Sweet Tornado: Margo Jones and the American Theater
Production Team
Kay Cattarulla, Co-Producer/Writer/Director
In 1978, Kay Cattarulla was part of the team that started Symphony Space, the innovative performing arts center at 95th Street and Broadway in New York. While working there, she originated the literary series Selected Shorts: A Celebration Of The Short Story, featuring readings by actors of short fiction, and together with Isaiah Sheffer launched the nationally broadcast version of the series that is currently heard in 140 cities on National Public Radio.
On moving to Dallas in 1990, Cattarulla founded the award-winning literary series Arts & Letters Live at the Dallas Museum of Art, and served as producer for its first twelve seasons. She edited three anthologies of stories deriving from the series, entitled Texas Bound, and produced four companion audio editions, all published by SMU Press. She produced two programs on Margo Jones for Arts & Letters Live in 1997, beginning eight years of research into Jones’s life and career.
Cattarulla was elected to membership in the Texas Institute of Letters in 2000. She was born in Ithaca, N.Y., and received a B.A. from Cornell University and an M.A. from Columbia University.
Rob Tranchin, Co-Producer/Writer/Director
Tranchin is an executive producer at KERA, where he is also a national Emmy Award-winning producer, writer and director. Prior to Sweet Tornado: Margo Jones and the American Theater, Tranchin wrote, produced and directed Roy Bedichek's Vanishing Frontier, a one-hour documentary about the life of a Texas naturalist that aired nationally on PBS in April 2003.
His other national productions for PBS include Wildcatter (for the PBS series American Experience), Who Cares about Kids? with poet and author Maya Angelou, For a Deaf Son, and Peacemaker. In 1999, he won a national Emmy Award as writer and co-producer of KERA's four-part nationally televised PBS series The U.S.-Mexican War (1846-1848). In 2000, Tranchin was nominated for another national Emmy Award as writer and co-producer of Matisse & Picasso, a compelling portrait of two giants of 20th century art.
Tranchin is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College and holds an M.A. in Cinema Studies from New York University. As a Henry Luce Foundation Scholar, Tranchin lived for two years in Japan, where he worked as an assistant director to the Japanese film director Imamura Shohei.
A. Dean Bell, Director, Theater Sequences
Dean Bell is an award-winning filmmaker whose most recent film is the feature-length drama What Alice Found, which he wrote and directed, starring two-time Tony winner Judith Ivey. Alice was nominated for the Grand Prize and garnered a Special Jury Award for Emotional Truth at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival. At the Deauville Festival of American Film in France Alice received the Grand Prize from Jury Chairman Roman Polanski. Alice was also selected Best Feature Film at the Cinema Paradisio Festival in Hawaii and was an official selection of many festivals around the world. After a 2004 theatrical release, Alice is available on home video and has been seen on the Sundance Channel, ShowTime and Life Time Television.
Bell’s previous feature film – also as writer/director – was the 1995 spoof comedy Backfire! with Robert Mitchum, Telly Savalas, Shelly Winters and Kathy Ireland.
Recently, Bell developed a pilot for a night-time drama under contract with Fox Broadcasting. Fox has produced a 10-minute sample of the pilot with Bell directing. Bell is also the writer/director/ co-producer of the award-winning educational television series SportsFigures which airs on ESPN. The program has won most major educational media awards including the prestigious Clarion Award for Best Children’s Program Ages 14 and Up in four separate years.
Bell received a BFA with Honors from the Purchase College film program. He has been teaching screenwriting and directing at Purchase since 1995.
Sylvia Komatsu, Executive in Charge
Sylvia Komatsu, senior vice president of content for KERA, is an award-winning journalist with extensive credits as producer, writer and program executive for many public television programs. She now oversees a Content unit that includes television production, program scheduling and acquisitions, and educational services. Among her many projects, she conceived and developed the national Emmy Award-winning documentary, The U.S.-Mexican War (1846-1848), a four-hour binational series that premiered on PBS and in Mexico.
Her national public television production credits as executive in charge include JFK: Breaking the News, a close-up look at how reporters responded to a national tragedy; Matisse & Picasso, which follows the interaction between the two master artists; After Goodbye: An AIDS Story, a candid portrayal of love, loss and courage that looked at the impact of AIDS on Dallas’ internationally renowned Turtle Creek Chorale; and For A Deaf Son, a first-person account by producer Rob Tranchin tracing his family’s journey through a maze of life-changing decisions that must be made when a deaf child is born to hearing parents.