CURT L. TOFTELAND brings 40+ years of professional theatre experience as a director, actor, producer, playwright, poet, writer, teacher, program developer, and prison arts practitioner. Curt has been working with arts in corrections since 1995. He is the founder of the internationally acclaimed Shakespeare Behind Bars program. SBB was documented in Philomath Films award-winning documentary that opened at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival and traveled to 40+ film festivals world-wide winning 11 awards. Curt is an in demand speaker and workshop facilitator having visited 60+ colleges and universities, completed four TEDx Talks, delivered keynotes at American conferences including the Shakespeare in Prison Network, Shakespeare Association of America, Modern Language Association, as well as internationally at Stratford, Canada; Rotterdam, Netherlands; Kolkata, India; Belfast, Northern Ireland, and Warsaw, Poland. Curt is a published poet and essayist writing about the transformative power of the arts to make us more human. (
www.shakespearebehindbars.org)