Robert Cucuzza is a theater artist, filmmaker, actor, acting teacher and founder of ACME Acting Lab. As a playwright, theater director and producer he spent six years as an artist-in-residence at the Ontological Theater in New York City where he mounted many highly-acclaimed original plays and developed a devoted following. His latest plays—Confidence, Women! and Carpenter's Gold—have both been created as part of ACME's Theater Lab.

As a filmmaker, he has written and directed the films The Invincible Ecksteins, The Blue Horizon, Speed Freaks and several shorts. His film The Armed Boy— a silent featurette created to accompany Karl Jenkin’s modern choral mass "The Armed Man"—was commissioned by the Rackham Symphony Choir in Detroit and premiered in March 2007.

As a film actor, he has played lead roles in Speed Freaks and Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (opposite Tony-award winner Jefferson Mays) and The Strange Case of Marie France, as well as a featured roles in Planet Earth: Dreams, Tiger: His Fall and Rise (with the late great Adrienne Shelly) and in Salvatore Interlandi's Charlie.

As a theater actor he has performed at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater and across Europe in Richard Foreman’s Panic! (How to be Happy!), Permanent Brain Damage, and My Head Was a Sledgehammer. He has played the role of Tom Buchanan in European and U.S. tours of Gatz — a complete staging of the entire text of "The Great Gatsby" — by the vanguard theater company Elevator Repair Service, with whom he also appeared in the U.S. and abroad in Total Fictional Lie and the Bessie Award- winning Room Tone. Also in New York, he played the title role Off-Broadway in Axis Company's Listen Houdini and has performed in dance-theater works by David Neumann and Big Dance Theater.

As an acting teacher he has taught popular classes in New York City and in his home state of Pennsylvania. In 2006 he founded ACME Acting Lab.

Originally from Bradford, PA, Cucuzza is a 1990 graduate of Carnegie Mellon University where he received a BFA in Literary and Cultural Studies with a minor in Theatre. He was the recipient of a 1990 Thomas J. Watson Fellowship for a one-year independent study of experimental theater in Europe where he traveled extensively, seeing over 100 productions from all over the world, and taking workshops and master classes with such theater luminaries as Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Stein, Ludwik Flaszen, Monika Pagneux, and Philippe Gaulier.

In the fall of 2008, Cucuzza will begin pursuing an M.F.A. in Directing from CalArts.

For more, go to www.robertcucuzza.com

DJ Mendel directed Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party for Pace University's Acting Program. His Off Broadway theater acting credits include In the Matter of Robert J. Oppenheimer and Richard Foreman’s Panic! (How to be Happy!), Permanent Brain Damage and The Universe at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater and in Europe.

A long-time collaborator with Hal Hartley, he has been in Mr. Hartley’s films Fay Grim (Toronto International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival), The Book of Life, No Such Thing, The New Math, The Girl From Monday and in Mr. Hartley’s theatrical debut, Soon. As a film actor he also starred in Richard Sylvarnes' The Cloud of Unknowing (Tribeca Film Festival) and in Salvatore Interlandi's Charlie (2007 MethodFest).

Feature films directed by Mendel include Make Pretend and Planet Earth: Dreams, as well at the featurettes Hesitation and Wake Up and Waltz for ACME.

He directed the world premiere of Rosanne Cash's Black Cadillac in Concert which has toured worldwide and Cynthia Hopkins’ Accidental Nostalgia at St. Ann’s Warehouse.

Mendel has taught acting classes at various institutions around New York City for years.

For more, go to www.startherefilms.com.