Meet the founders
Ian Cramer
Ian Cramer is a Brooklyn-based actor hailing from the Green Mountain State. While growing up in Vermont, Ian had several of his teachers encourage him to continue in theater and the arts. He studied Film Studies and Production at Hofstra University after which he became very involved with the New York City film and theater scene. He holds many theater and film credits, has a fun-loving dog named Tecumseh and likes to watch Paul Newman movies in his downtime.
John Wills Martin
John is a long-time actor and acting coach who has directed for both film and stage. John worked as an assistant director at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in development with writers Philip Kan Gotanda, Migdalia Cruz, Tony Kushner, Ariel Dorfman, and others. He graduated from the American Film Institute’s Directing program and produced an Academy Award-winning short. He was a professor at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts Asia in Singapore and taught in all three years of NYU’s Graduate Film program in the acting/directing line here in New York. His screen credits include The Thicket starring Juliette Lewis, Levon Hawke, and Peter Dinklage, The Believer with Ryan Gosling, and Michael Almereyda's Hamlet with Sam Shepard. Presently, John is an Assistant Arts Professor at NYU teaching in UGFTV and Collaborative Arts.
John is proud to have studied with Harry Mastrogeorge, Judith Weston and Charlie Laughton.
Vart Awakimian
Vart is a New York City-based artist, actress, comedian, writer, and dancer whose work moves between stage and screen. She brings a wide emotional range, a sharp comedic instinct, and a dancer’s physical presence. Fluent in English, Spanish, Armenian, and several Arabic dialects, she also brings a colorful internationalism to her work.
On stage, she has led plays, playback performances, and immersive theater, earning a “praise-worthy performance” from The Daily Star. On screen, she starred in a music video that won Best Music Video Short at the Sugar Loaf Film Festival, and in Bipen B. K, a short film that won Best Short Film at the Al Ain Film Festival. A dancer in Brazilian Zouk, Salsa, Bachata, West Coast Swing, ballet, and contemporary, she has performed in music videos, with dance groups, and in live shows.
Vart holds a B.A. in Psychology with a minor in Theater from the American University of Beirut and an M.A. in Higher Education and Student Affairs from New York University, alongside training in screen acting at NYU Tisch.
Point Blank by Manny Farber
I believe these little patterns of our lives, of how we behave, are important. These little ways of coping and falling out. We are looking to create truthful experiences within particular story frameworks that we share with an audience. The work is not about perfect nor is it solipsistic; it is in the moment, ephemeral, and outward-looking. The work done in the studio is a permission avenue for the work done outside. It is practice and a practical approach.
Ian and Vart pulled me out of my academic hibernation and back into a professional workshop, for which I am grateful. I ran a workshop under my own name before, the John Wills Martin Acting Workshop, but hopefully this is something different, more of a collective, more of a lateral structure. We all can learn from each other. For me, I’m harkening back to my early Mark Taper and Padua Hills roots: inspired by the work of Roxanne Rogers and John Steppling and Murray Mednick and Sam Shepherd. No gurus. Challenging convention. About acting and directing certainly but more about the ideas, wrestling with them, realizing and experiencing these larger ideas, fostering a self-reliant relationship with our work as artists and craftsmen. Towards a healthy independence, learning how to approach a variety of stories using imagination, story sense, vitality, and personalization. At the end of the day, having material of your own with your name on it that speaks to you, and work that addresses the reality of our times with nature under siege is empowering.
This work is done with hope, ambition, and with fire in the snow.
John