Zulia, an Ohio native, first acquired concerned within the Roanoke theater scene in the summertime of 1976, when he got here straight from faculty in western New York to behave in Mill Mountain Playhouse’s summer season reveals. At the moment the theater firm nonetheless placed on its productions on the Rockledge Inn atop Mill Mountain. In October of that yr, Rockledge Inn burned to the bottom, the results of an obvious arson.
The theater, nonetheless, persevered, transferring into the empty Grandin Theatre and launching the “Phoenix Season” in summer season 1977 with a smash manufacturing of “A Humorous Factor Occurred on the Solution to the Discussion board” that Zulia was a part of.
A decade later, after he earned a Grasp of Effective Arts from Northwestern College, Zulia moved to Roanoke and have become Mill Mountain Theatre’s affiliate creative director. Working beneath longtime MMT creative producing director Jere Hodgin, Zulia and collaborator David Caldwell tailored Robert Fulghum’s bestseller “All I Actually Want To Know I Realized In Kindergarten” for the stage. Quickly after a world premiere at Mill Mountain, Zulia left Roanoke to direct performances of the play everywhere in the world.
By 2004 he had made his approach again to Roanoke to direct and educate as a visitor artist at Hollins — and ended up employed as theater division chair. Zulia recruited Hollins Playwright’s Lab founder Todd Ristau to the school and created the Hollins Theatre Institute as an umbrella for the division’s undergraduate and graduate packages. A $3 million present from the James S. McDonnell Household Basis allowed Zulia to supervise an intensive renovation and improve of the college’s 97-year-old theater.
