Jasmin Cardenas
Jasmin Cardenas is a Colombian-American award-winning bilingual storyteller, theater maker, actress, educator, and social activist. She uses teatro and play to create spaces where people can connect, tell their stories, and spark change. Inspired by El Teatro Campesino, Jasmin began using Theater of the Oppressed to devise original scenes with working people in the fight for workers’ rights, dramatically altering the course of her life.
Recognized for her arts and civic engagement work, Jasmin was awarded a 2020-2022 international LAB Fellowship by The Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University. UNESCO and the International Theatre Institute (ITI) selected her as the 2022 U.S. Emergent Theater Artist for World Theater Day.
In 2023, Jasmin was awarded the USArtists International MidAtlantic Arts Grant to support her invitation to perform her newest solo show “DISPOSABLE” at the Mitambo Theater Festival in Harare, Zimbabwe, and to conduct additional touring and Master Classes in Johannesburg, South Africa.
In 2020, she added filmmaker to her skills when she produced her first short documentary film about essential workers, “Essential?…Tengo que Trabajar/I Have to Work,” which was screened at Collaboraction’s 2020 PeaceBOOK Festival and the 2021 Screening Scholarship Media Festival CAMRA. Recently awarded a solo commission by 1st Stage Theater in Tysons, Virginia, Jasmin is currently writing her newest solo play, “DISPOSABLE,” a documentary-style theater piece.
Winner of the 2018 Outstanding Storyteller ALTA Award, Jasmin was recognized by the Alliance of Latinx Theater Artists of Chicago. Her personal tales explore the uncomfortable truths found when growing up between cultures. She has been a featured teller at the Midland Storytelling Festival (Texas), Kansas City Storytelling Festival (Missouri), and the Evanston Storytelling Festival (Illinois). Jasmin’s national touring reached new heights when she was an Exchange Place Teller at the 2016 National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee.
One of the first two Latinas awarded the 2012 Race Bridges Storytelling Fellowship, Jasmin created two new social justice stories from her life, now available on her CD “My Brothers’ Keeper: Stories of Social Justice and Civic Responsibility.” She regularly tours her bilingual program “Cuentos from the Americas,” which highlights lesser-known folktales, myths, and legends from North, Central, and South America, with special attention to Colombian stories, as well as personal tales about being bi-cultural. As the Chicago Public Library Cuentos Aqui Teller, she had the privilege of working with Latino children and families as an early literacy specialist. Jasmin is also a 2nd Story performer and adores that tribe.
Her one-woman show, written and performed by Jasmin, is called “¿Niña Buena?”—a coming-of-age story highlighting the joys and challenges of being Latina y Americana. It has toured in the Midwest and to Puebla, Mexico, where it was included in the Susana Alexander International Theater Festival.
Jasmin is a professional actress working throughout Chicagoland’s vibrant theater community, last seen on stages across the city: Steppenwolf, Goodman, Urban Theater, Lifeline, Teatro Luna, and Adventure Stage Chicago. A proud SAG-AFTRA member, her TV credits include NBC’s “Chicago Fire,” Showtime’s “The CHI,” ABC’s “Betrayal,” and several independent films. She is proudly represented by Big Mouth Talent Inc.
Mo Reynolds
Mo Reynolds is a storyteller, speaker, reader, workshop leader, teacher, and a generally joyful wordsmith who also enjoys hiking whenever possible. She lives with her family in Rexburg, Idaho, and is dedicated to sharing stories that foster connections. Mo holds a B.A. and M.A. in English Literature, has three kids, one husband, one dog, two cats, and a vast collection of books—though she believes it’s just shy of enough.
Mo has performed and led workshops in schools and festivals across the country, including in Montana, Idaho, Utah, Florida, South Carolina, and Tennessee. In October 2022, she was invited to perform at the National Storytelling Festival on the Exchange Place stage. In 2023, she was featured at the Women’s Storytelling Festival in Fairfax, VA, the Kansas Storytelling Festival in Downs, KS, and the National Storytelling Festival. In 2024, Mo will be a featured storyteller at the Timpanogos Storytelling Festival in Lehi, UT, and the Ojai Storytelling Festival in Ojai, CA.
Mo invites you to explore her work and connect with her to share stories together. She’ll bring the bandanas.
Debs Newbold
As a world-class performance storyteller and one of the UK’s leading performers in this field, Debs has made work for venues such as Shakespeare’s Globe, the Royal Opera House, the Southbank Centre, the RSC, the NHS, Hay Festival, Peace Child International, and the BBC. A fearlessly imaginative story artist, she has spent the last 20 years creating a vivid body of critically admired work that explores the human condition through storytelling and theatre. Her creations are funny, deeply felt, often cathartic, and connect with a wide range of audiences and participants worldwide.
Her genre-defying collaborations with renowned director John Wright (Peter Brook Award winner and founder of Told by an Idiot) are widely regarded as having helped re-define contemporary storytelling in the UK. A Shakespeare specialist, with over 15 years of professional association with Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, Debs’ highly celebrated trilogy of solo adaptations of Shakespeare’s tragedies has toured to international acclaim since 2014, and her storytelling has transformed the work of Shakespeare’s Globe Education.
Debs is also a highly skilled and experienced trainer and facilitator, working internationally alongside companies such as Shakespeare’s Globe, the Southbank Centre, Bright Torches, the Drive Project, Bravo 22, Middlesex University, BestTellers Denmark, Museum of Legends Ljungby Sweden, and many others. Debs also lectures and directs theatre at Leeds Conservatoire.
Dolores Hydock
Dolores Hydock is an actress and story performer, whose work has been featured at a variety of concerts, festivals, and special events throughout the U.S. She has been a featured storyteller at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee, has been Teller-in-Residence at Jonesborough’s International Storytelling Center, and her twelve CDs of original stories have all received Resource Awards from Storytelling World Magazine.
Dolores is originally from Reading, Pennsylvania, home of the Reading Railroad and Luden’s Cough Drops. Her hometown is where she won her first blue ribbon in storytelling in a local contest at the age of 5. The real gold letters on the blue ribbon convinced her there was obviously a fortune to be made in the performing arts. She continues to hope.
As an actress, she has been featured in the one-woman plays Tony Curtis Speaks Italian and All I can Say is ‘I Love You,’ Take a Ride on the Reading, In Her Own Fashion, Shirley Valentine, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, Becoming Dr. Ruth, Fully Committed, The Lady With All the Answers, and Nothing Sacred: An Evening of Stories by Ferrol Sams. Her early theatrical career included portraying the Statue of Liberty in a Fourth of July pageant. The role required her to stand on a float in the middle of a pond, wearing a 20-pound electrified crown on her head. She somehow managed to survive that role without drowning or electrocuting herself, but has avoided historical dramas ever since.
Dolores lives in Birmingham, Alabama. In her spare time, she tends a garden that includes a pomegranate bush, muscadine vines, blueberry bushes, a 20-foot jujuba tree, and a family of slugs the size of cheap cigars. She’s held a wide variety of jobs: She’s been a house parent at a halfway house for juvenile delinquents, a blues DJ, an au pair in Paris for three small children, a computer sales representative for IBM, a cookbook copy editor, an acting teacher at Birmingham-Southern College, and a teacher of Cajun dancing. If anyone questions her strange path through such a variety of jobs, she simply says that it’s all just material for her stories.