About Us
LAST WEST is a collective of theater artists working together to produce and share the play LAST WEST: ROADSONGS FOR DOROTHEA LANGE, an innovative theater experience at the intersection of poetry, arts exhibition, and projection design, which explores the California we inherit through the lens of groundbreaking Depression-era photographer Dorothea Lange. We work as a diverse team to bring this critical work to audiences across California, especially in places underserved by theater, and in places Lange documented. We uplift Lange’s work now because she turned her lens on social, political, and environmental issues still facing Californians today– climate change, shelterlessness, migrancy, and internment. Lange’s story fosters empathy, and her work leans across time and boundary to remind us of the promise and importance of public art, our shared search for dignity, our linked struggles, and our common cause.
LAST WEST began as a collage poem conceived in the Oakland Museum Archive in 2018, when poet Tess Taylor (who grew up in El Cerrito, a working-class suburb Dorothea Lange once photographed) uncovered Lange’s rarely seen road notebooks and then traveled to the towns Lange documented in the 1930s and 1940s, writing her letters from the present. Taylor’s text interweaves Lange’s journals filled with the voices and witness of folks Lange gathered along California’s roads of the past, with Taylor’s -day meditations, reporting, and reflection on crises facing ordinary Californians today.
LAST WEST—as a book of poems— first appeared at MoMA in 2020 as part of the “Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures” exhibition. In 2021, Taylor decided to turn the book into a play, where it was workshopped at Magic Theatre. By 2025, LAST WEST (supported by a CoLABo fellowship at Carnegie Mellon) was built as an immersive play in five voices. In Fall 2025, LAST WEST premiered to a sold out run at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, where we formed LAST WEST the theater company with a common goal of sharing LAST WEST across California, envisioning the play as a tool to spark empathy and build conversation about art as a necessary component of cultural repair. We’ve partnered with Marin Theater and the Oakland Museum as our institutional partners for 2026-2027performances around the Bay Area. Our next showings will be in Oakland, Marin and El Cerrito- (Alameda, Contra Costa and Marin Counties), with active discussions about bringing LAST WEST to Southern California as well. Stay tuned!
Tess Taylor is the author of five celebrated poetry collections including The Misremembered World, The Forage House, Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, and Rift Zone (named a 2020 Boston Globe best book), and Work & Days (a 2016 NY Times best poetry book). Her work as a cultural critic appears in Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, CNN, The New York Times, and more. She has taught widely, from UC Berkeley to Queen’s University in Belfast, and served as on air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered for over a decade. She recently published her first full length poetry anthology: Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens and the Hands that Tend Them, a collection of contemporary gardening poems for an era of climate crisis. A staged adaptation of her book of poems about Dorothea Lange launched at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art in 2025. Her next book, Come Bite, will be published in 2026. She lives and gardens just outside Berkeley, California.
Tess was awarded an Academy of American Poets’ Poet Laureate Fellowship in 2024 and served as the Poet Laureate of El Cerrito, California, where she hosted literary events in schools and community centers.
Tess Taylor
Ryan Yu is a media designer and theater-maker. Ryan is currently pursuing an MFA in Video & Media Design at Carnegie Mellon University. Ryan holds a BA in Classics (Greek literature) and Theater (Design), with a minor in Music Composition from Stanford University.
Ryan has worked across genres of performance making - from literary theatre, musicals, operas, to dance and installations. Recent works include Ajax at Carnegie Mellon University, In A Memory Palace with Theatre Nohgaku, and objects to destroy ourselves with at Nitery Experimental Theatre.
Ryan is interested in queer utopias, unintelligible noise, painting with no brush, and screaming with no mouth; in hopes of getting across.
Ryan Yu
Sara Witsch is a genderqueer noisemaker, sound artist, production specialist, and lifelong learner who graduated with a BA in Theater Arts from San Francisco State University. Sara designs sound for theater, radio plays, immersive art, video games and so much more. They specialize in soundscapes and ambience. She is drawn to work that shares her commitment to thoughtful storytelling, art as a movement of revolution and resistance, and giving every voice an opportunity to be heard. They are Co-Artistic Director and Production Manager at SoundPlay Media, a sound collective exploring the world of sound specific performance art and theater-focused media. Check out Sound-Play’s podcast series at barewiretheater.com.
Sara Witsch
CIERA EIS is a bicoastal director, who develops socio-political new work and seeks to emphasize the experiences of life that are queer, messy, visceral, otherworldly, weird, wild, and hilarious.
Recent directing credits include: Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange (Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, Oakland Museum of California, ColLABo at Carnegie Mellon University), Hadestown (American Conservatory Theatre YC), The Mushroom God of Leaf-Cutter Ants (The Tank NYC), Signs of the Kingdom (Ca$h Grant), WORK/SHOOT (Playground SF), Love U: A New Musical (Z Below/ TBA Ca$h Grant), Future is Queer (Left Coast Theatre Co), She Kills Monsters (SF Community High School), Circle Mirror Transformation (Custom Made Theater),
Ciera was the Assistant Director of Wakey Wakey by Will Eno, directed by Anne Kauffman, starring Tony Hale (American Conservatory Theater) and Both Your Houses written by Susan Soon He Stanton (writer on “Succession”) directed by Mina Morita (American Conservatory Theater), and an observer on Harry Clarke by David Cale.
For five years Ciera was a producer on Berkeley Repertory's New Works Summer Program The Ground Floor, she is a founding member of The Bay Area Director’s Collective, and was the Interim Artistic Director of Custom Made Theatre Co and a Co-Artistic Director of FaultLine Theater SF. She is a Playground Company Member, 2024 Directors Lab West Recipient and, 2019-2021 Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation Observer.
She received her B.A. in Theater Arts and Psychology from University of California, Santa Cruz. Awards: Winner of Shortlived Play Festival VIII, Promising Women in Theatre, Porter Arts Grant, Da Vinci Scholar Award, and Renaissance Artist Award.
Ciera Eis
Board of Directors
Sally Stein, Prof. Emerita, UC Irvine, has most recently had published by MACK a selection of her photography essays: Close-ups from Afar (2025). Now living in NYC, she continues researching photography – both black-and-white & color - and its discourse. . Dr. Sally Stein has long studied photographic topics in relation to broader questions of culture and society. She has published extensively on FSA and New Deal government photography as well as the contested image of FDR; in 2020 she culminated many decades of research and essays on Dorothea Lange with a revisionist monograph on Lange’s famed Migrant Mother. Along with numerous essays about popular mass media – Ladies Home Journal, Life and Look – she has continued to study the rise of color photography, starting with her 1979 article announcing her finding a trove of previously unknown color transparencies by photographers working for the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration (FSA). Her most recent publication, Gail Rebhan, About Time (MACK), accompanies the 2023 Rebhan retrospective Stein curated in DC at AU’s Katzen Galleries. For more info: www.sallystein.com.
Sally Stein
Peter Glazer is a playwright, director, author and Emeritus Professor of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. His book Radical Nostalgia: Spanish Civil War Commemoration in America, based on his dissertation, was published in 2005. Other adaptations and collaborations as a playwright and director include Heart of Spain: A Musical of the Spanish Civil War with composer Eric Peltoniemi, O’Carolan’s Farewell to Music with Celtic harper Patrick Ball, Michael, Margaret, Pat & Kate with Chicago singer/songwriter Michael Smith, and Foe, his adaptation of Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee’s novel, which had its world premiere at UC Berkeley. He is presently working on an adaptation of Karen Shepard’s historical novel The Celestials.
Glazer is a member of the Governing Board of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA). For 30 years he has helped write, direct, and produce commemorative events celebrating the US anti-fascist volunteers in the Spanish Civil War.
Peter Glazer
Elizabeth Dell
Elizabeth Dell is a film and content producer, producing plays, films, TV pilots, webseries, commercials, etc, including Destination Wedding, starring Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves. She is currently leading microdrama business for Hoorae Media / Issa Rae and was recently as the Head of Production for CandyJarTV. Elizabeth is also the CEO and founder of the romance and games couples app Amorus and co-founder of music and intimacy product Groove Thing.