Meet the Staff

MEET SFYT'S STAFF!

 
Emily Klion, SFYT Executive and Artistic Director, specializes in collaborating with artists from all disciplines, creating and producing new works of theater for youth with an emphasis on social justice. She has a BA and MA from Mills College in music composition, where she studied with the great Terry Riley and Lou Harrison. Emily composes much of the music for SFYT’s original productions. Before founding SF Youth Theatre, Emily was the director of the Marsh Youth Theater (MYT), which she help create in 2001, developing a community youth theater magnet for young artists throughout the Bay Area. She received the American Harmony Prize for her original script and score of Katherine Paterson’s “Jip, His Story”, and the Rex Foundation’s “Jerry Garcia Award” for promoting creativity in youth.
Leslie Price, SFYT's Program Coordinator is a theatre educator, director, and writer who is currently serving as San Francisco Youth Theatre's Program Coordinator. She's spent much of her career as a teaching artist specializing in work by and for young people. Most recently, she served as the Children's Director for a large non-profit youth theatre in the Chicagoland area creating curriculum and producing a variety of plays and musicals including an original adaptation of Al Capone Does My Shirts by San Francisco's Gennifer Choldenko. In addition to her work at SFYT, Leslie works as the Production Manager at Ragged Wing Ensemble in Oakland and as a writer for Clef Notes Journal, an arts magazine in Chicago. 
Dyana Díaz, SFYT's Outreach Coordinator and Teaching Artist, is a Puerto Rican actress and teaching artist; she earned her B.A. in Performing Arts for the Theatrical Expression at the University of Guadalajara in Mexico, in 2012. There, she was co founder of “Colectivo Transeunte” a theatre group dedicated to the creation of performances for young audiences. With Colective Transeunte, she worked as an actress, assistant director, stage manager and producer in numerous performances, locally and internationally. On 2014 she was co founder of  INART, Institute of the Performing Arts, the first private acting school in Guadalajara, Mexico where she worked as a teaching artist and academic coordinator. In early 2017, she arrived in San Francisco and started working with SFYT staff team and as a teaching artist in various public schools.