Also a playwright, director and actor D.M. Ripley taught for years with the Arts Express afterschool theatre and “Improv for Teens” programs. He has also taught acting for dancers at the Canadian Contemporary Dance Theatre’s Sundance summer school and has twice directed the Blyth Festival Theatre’s Young Company program. Other teaching credits include 2 years as a Theatre History instructor for Ryerson University’s School of Performance. His plays have appeared on stages from Sydney to Dubai to Chennai. When not making theatre Michael spends downtime playing D&D with his sons, friends and the goblin folk that live behind his furnace. His first DnD character was Baffle Cakecheek – a bard/baker bagpiper with a knack for the arcane art of philo-mancy.

Professor Woolfe is the artistic director of Eldritch Theatre, a company specializing in plays about the creepy and uncanny, using puppetry, live actors and parlour magic. He will be using these arcane talents as our school’s chief puppetry and magic instructor. Aside from his skills as a necromancer, he works as both actor and playwright and itinerant showman, also being one of Canada’s few Punch and Judy Professors, and the impresario of the worlds only Dora Award Nominated Flea Circus. Mr Woolfe has been playing Dungeons and Dragons since 1980. His first character was Amic Fenris Tesh, a halfling fighter-magic user, whose best friend was a talking Phoenix.

Emma Mackenzie Hillier is a Toronto-based producer, dramaturg, and all around nerd. She trained in acting, and upon deciding to give that up she trained in dramaturgy at Factory Theatre, Nightswimming Theatre, and at Stratford Shakespeare Festival. She continued her dramaturgical work in Toronto’s busy indie theatre community, eventually co-showrunning and co-producing the six-episode miniseries for the stage, The Numbers Game. To satisfy her need to get things done, she turned to producing, and has worked with multiple companies in Toronto, ensuring their productions came to the stage as smoothly as possible. For the last two years, she has switched gears and now works for The Walrus, the home of Canada’s Conversation, as one of their Event Planners, bringing interesting to their engaged audience. Ms Mackenzie-Hillier was asked to join the faculty as a long term occasional, after her impressive defeat of Lady Zara’s Gargantuan Fire Breathing Hamster of Death, which she slew by feeding it her Magical Immovable Rod wrapped in smoked meat, thereby freeing her now unencumbered party to unleash of volley of spells and ranged attacks.