Stephen Yaffe is an arts and education consultant, evaluator, playwright, former teaching artist and former professor who has developed new teaching tools, written curriculum, provided professional development to teachers K-12 (General Education, Special Education, Gifted and Talented, ESL and Bilingual) and artists since 1972.  His work has appeared in Educational Leadership and has been featured in Instructor Magazine as well as Horace, a publication of the national school reform project, The Coalition of Essential Schools.

Yaffe has served as consultant to the Howard Heinz Endowment (evaluation of the Pittsburgh Fund for Arts Education), Supervisor of the Documentation Team of The DeWitt Wallace-Readers Digest School Partners Project (a New York City arts and cultural institutions program serving over 60,000 students), conducted a needs assessment for the New York State Council on the Arts' Arts-In-Education Program, as well as evaluated numerous arts and education initiatives.

In 2008, he conducted a needs assessment of special needs students and the arts in New York City Public Schools, K-12, under the auspices of VSA arts, an international arts and education organization and affiliate of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

He mentors disabled teaching artists across the country, both as the VSA arts Teaching Artist Fellows coach and as coach for the VSA arts Community of Practice program.

He is co-chair of The Arts in Special Education Consortium, a New York-based forum for stakeholders and constituencies involved in arts education of students on the special education spectrum to share perspectives, ascertain needs and deepen practice.

Yaffe is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama.  His plays have been produced at The Public Theater and Playwrights Horizons in New York, as well as in Hartford and New Haven.  He is a recipient of a Connecticut State Commission on the Arts Individual Artist Grant in Playwriting and, along with his wife and writing partner Barbara Vaccaro, of the Joyce Carol Oates Playwriting/Mentoring Fellowship.  Yaffe and Vaccaro were finalists for The Julie Harris Playwright Award.

William Shorr is an American director and actor. His directing credits include Mass Appeal  (Snowmass Theatre Festival), Glance of A Landscape (Playwrights Horizons), The Threepenny Opera (CCM), and The Golden Age (1979 Aspen Playwrights Conference). He returned to the Aspen Playwrights Conference two years later, in 1981, and acted as the festival's producing director. Shorr's acting credits include Johan and War and Peace, both Off-Broadway.