BIOGRAPHY

Mark has been a successful member of the professional theatre community for over a quarter-century, working as an actor, director, and fight director.  

He earned a terminal MFA degree from the prestigious Professional Theatre Training Program at the University of Delaware, named one of the top 25 theatre training programs in the world (Hollywood Reporter).  He also holds a BFA degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, auditioned and was selected for 1 of 18 spots (from a field of over 3000 auditionees) to work 90 hours a week as an unpaid apprentice for a year at the Tony award-winning Actors Theatre of Louisville.   He was awarded the Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Scholarship to study advanced stage combat techniques and is an award-winning Advanced Actor Combatant with the Society of American Fight Directors. 

Mark has appeared on and off Broadway with such stars as Denzel Washington and Kelsey Grammer as well as worked at many of the nation's most well respected and award-winning regional theatres.  Classically trained, he has portrayed many of the great characters of world theatre, among them Cyrano de Bergerac, Macbeth, Cassius in Julius Caesar, Touchstone in As You Like It, Caliban in The Tempest, Long John Silver in Treasure Island, and Lennie in Of Mice & Men. He has created roles in almost a dozen world premiere productions by such playwrights as Jane Martin and Eric Cobble, and even had roles written for him by multiple Tony and Drama Desk Award-winner Arthur Kopit.

In 2009 he moved to Frankfurt, Germany and continued to find work as an actor, director, and fight director, appearing in such films as What A Man and Iron Sky in addition to working as a performance capture artist for the blockbuster video games Crysis II, Bullet Storm, and NCIS: The Game.  During his time in Frankfurt he helped to found and develop the Theatre In Education Services (TiES) program with the English Theatre of Frankfurt and created workshops on the plays of ETF’s seasons as well as creating specialized workshops in Shakespeare for high schools in and around Frankfurt.

Mark comes from a family of educators and has actively sought out teaching and coaching opportunities throughout his professional career, working predominantly with apprentice companies and universities giving workshops and master classes.  In 2011 he shifted the focus of his career to teaching and served as Associate Professor of Practice and Head of the Acting Curriculum at The American University in Cairo. 

At AUC his 2012 production of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest was heralded as 'a valuable and long overdue contribution to theatre in the Middle East.'  In 2013 his production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream became the most popular English-speaking production AUC has staged, and his most recent and final production in Egypt, Little Shop of Horrors was the first musical produced on the AUC New Cairo campus.  His directorial work in Egypt regularly broke new ground academically and artistically by setting records for attendance, raising the bar for theatrical performance, audition turnout, professional best practices, the use of understudy companies, design and production of publicity materials, pioneering an unparalleled use of sound design in partnership with David Tawfik, eschewing the 'need' for body mics in musicals, increasing cross-departmental collaboration, extending the reach of budget dollars, attaining an unequalled number of faculty - student contact hours, raising the profile of AUC theatre on campus and in the community, as well as seeing an unmatched number of students move into the professional theatre and film industries in the United States, United Kingdom, and Middle East.

In the fall of 2015 Mark moved back to the United States where he is a tenured Associate Professor of Theatre Performance at Otterbein University.

During his thirty plus years in the professional theatre Mark has found work during the lean times as a professional stage manager, costume designer, assistant set designer, production photographer, shop carpenter, deck chief, juggling sheet seller, computer salesman, potter, technology consultant, network administrator,  and certified Apple service technician.  He has yet to wait a table (fingers crossed).