Rebekah Walendzak Slepski

My teaching is grounded in embodied rigor, ethical collaboration, and a pedagogy of joy—understood not as ease or positivity, but as safety, fulfillment, and sustainability. I design learning environments that balance challenge with care, centering clarity, consent, and shared responsibility so students can engage deeply without burnout or harm.

I approach acting and performance training as an embodied, relational craft developed through structured, play-based practice, repetition, and ensemble work. Students learn by doing—building technique through presence, imagination, listening, and collaboration. Global Majority performance traditions are treated as foundational ways of knowing rather than supplemental content, expanding the canon while maintaining rigor and specificity.

I take inclusive and ethical practice seriously and engage it as an ongoing area of study, reflection, and responsibility. My training includes graduate-level coursework in Equity & Diversity in the Classroom, Healing Pedagogies, and Intimacy and Consent practices, which informs how I design learning environments, facilitate collaboration, and hold power as an instructor and director. These commitments shape my approach to teaching, directing, and leadership across all creative spaces. 

Full Statement

Director | Community-Centered Shakespeare | Practice-as-Research

This production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was conceived as a love letter to East Los Angeles, staged as a culturally specific, community-centered adaptation honoring the neighborhood’s rhythms, humor, and collective imagination. Developed as a nine-actor cut, the project examined how Global Majority performance vocabularies can function as foundational actor training rather than decorative framing.

The fairy world was reimagined through Mexican-American archetypal figures drawn from East Los Angeles community life. Key dramaturgical choices included Titania as Frida Kahlo, Oberon as a Zoot Suiter, and a fairy ensemble embodied through folklórico dance traditions, grounding Shakespeare’s fantasy in culturally specific movement, rhythm, and power dynamics. Bottom was reimagined as a contemporary famous-actor aspirant, translating Shakespeare’s comic ego into a recognizable register of ambition and performance culture.

Rehearsal processes centered embodied play, archetype exploration, and ensemble authorship, inviting actors to integrate personal and cultural knowledge into their work. As practice-as-research, the production demonstrates how classical texts can be re-activated through local knowledge, shared authorship, and embodied training, aligning with my broader inquiry into de-centering Eurocentric defaults in actor training.

Co-Creator, Head Writer, Director

The Ville was a long-running, monthly live LGBTQIA+ soap opera staged at Mary’s Attic, the upstairs performance space at Hamburger Mary’s in Chicago. I served as Head Writer and directed 11 of the 18 hour-long episodes, leading a repertory ensemble during a period when marriage equality existed in only a handful of U.S. states and queer representation in television and film was still limited.

Named for the surrounding Andersonville neighborhood—one of Chicago’s longstanding LGBTQIA+ cultural centers—the series was conceived for and with the local community. Episodes addressed issues that mattered to audiences while balancing comedy, drama, music, and movement, inviting audiences to laugh at ourselves and with ourselves while engaging questions of identity, kinship, and survival.

The production operated on a rolling repertory model in which writers authored new episodes while the cast simultaneously rehearsed upcoming episodes and performed the current one. Actors reported that this structure trained them to make bold choices quickly, get off book rapidly, and trust their process under pressure—putting in repeated reps of mastery through sustained application of their training. Writers and actors collaborated closely, learning to write for specific characters and integrate actor traits into narrative development, mirroring the collaborative logic of a televised series.

Beyond writing and directing, I participated in the full producing ecology of the project, including recruiting artists from the community, coordinating technical and design teams, marketing performances, and contributing to grant proposals and resource development. As practice-as-research, The Ville examined serialized live performance, queer narrative form, and repertory labor models as tools for artistic training and community-centered cultural production.

Faculty, Instructor, Director (2008–Present)

For nearly two decades, I have taught, directed, and developed curriculum at The Second City, working across acting, improvisation, sketch writing, musical improvisation, and comedy television writing. In addition to teaching, I have directed a wide range of ensemble-based graduation and performance revues that functioned as laboratories for practice-as-research.

My directing work includes graduation sketch revues in the Writing Program and productions within the Music Improv Program, including fully improvised musicals, musical sketch revues, and original devised comedic musicals. Across these formats, I guided performers through fast-paced, collaborative creation processes emphasizing authorship, ensemble intelligence, musical responsiveness, and sustainable creative practice.

This sustained professional engagement informs my research and pedagogy in Performance & Pedagogy, examining how structured play, repetition, and ensemble ethics support rapid skill acquisition, adaptability, and long-term artistic development across performance contexts.