An Actor, Director and Writer, SANDIE ELDRIDGE is a WAAPA acting graduate and has a Master of Arts (Practice) for Directing CSU. She is one of the co-founders of Monkey Baa where she co-adapted over 20 works for the stage and directed, acted, created and facilitated workshops throughout Australia and overseas. Writer adaptations include Wilfrid, Gordon, McDonald, Partridge, How to Catch a Star for the Australian Chamber Orchestra. For MB over twenty works with adaptations of Thursday’s Child, Hitler’s Daughter, Pete the Sheep, Peasant Prince all published by Currency Press and Worry Warts, The Unknown Soldier her original work, for PlayLab. An anthology of short plays for Primary Schools, Blake Publishing Directing credits include Possum Magic, Goodbye Jamie Boyd, The Prospector's, I am Jack, Hitler's Daughter and Thursday’s Child, 2007 & 2009 Helpmann Award for Best Children's Presentation, MB. Kindertransport and Maggie Stone; Darlinghurst TC. Sydney Theatre Award winning, Wilfrid, Gordon, McDonald, Partridge & How to Catch a Star ACO. Being Beethoven CDP, The Actors Centre, WAAPA and JMC. She has numerous and extensive acting credits in Theatre, TV and Film. In 2017 The Sydney Theatre Critics special award for Excellence and Extraordinary Service to the Young People of Australia.

Passionate about interrogating and developing new Australian work, TIM MCGARRY trained in theatre at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. His writing credits include – for Brisbane Festival/QPAC Trent Dalton’s Love Stories, for CDP Theatre Producers Being Beethoven,  Queensland Theatre/QPAC Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe, Christine Dunstan Productions Colleen McCullough’s Tim, Australian Chamber Orchestra There’s A Sea In My Bedroom, Sydney Opera House Families Unit Music for the Dreaming, The Nutcracker, Swing Baby Swing, Monkey Baa Thursday’s Child, Hitler’s Daughter, I Am Jack, Goodbye Jamie Boyd, The Peasant Prince, True Story of Mao’s Last Dancer, Pete the Sheep, Sydney Symphony Who Needs A Conductor Anyway.  Between 2005-2017 Tim was a Creative Director of Monkey Baa Theatre Company, one of Australia’s largest touring companies for young audiences, where he co-wrote over 20 new Australian works, touring nationally and internationally, receiving multiple Helpmann, Glug, and Sydney Theatre awards.Tim also works as a theatre director, actor and dramaturg.

EVA DI CESARE graduated from Victorian College of the Arts in 1989 and is one of the founding members of Monkey Baa Theatre Company. She directed Jackie French and Bruce Whatley’s Diary of a Wombat, which won the Glug Award for Outstanding Presentation for Children. Cesare also wrote and directed Where the Streets Had a Name, based on the novel by Randa Abdel-Fattah. She has co-adapted Sydney Theatre Award winning play Li Cunxin’s The Peasant Prince, Helpmann award winning plays Jackie French's Hitler’s Daughter and Sonya Hartnett's Thursday's Child, Tim Winton's The Bugalugs Bum Thief, Morris Gleitzman's Worry Warts, Gillian Rubinstein's The Fairy's Wings, Stephen Michael King's Milli, Jack and the Dancing Cat, Susanne Gervay’s I Am Jack, Elizabeth Fensham's Goodbye Jamie Boyd, Duncan Ball's Emily Eyefinger, and Jackie French and Bruce Whatley’s Pete the Sheep and Josephine Wants to Dance. She also co-wrote and directed the 2013 Opera House show Babies Proms Series and Snugglepot and Cuddlepie (with Sandra Eldridge) for CDP Theatre Producers and Simon Tedeschi Pianist and Prankster for Monkey Baa. In 2017 Cesare was awarded a Sydney Theatre Award for 20 years of excellence and extraordinary service to the children and young people of Australia.

LI CUNXIN was born into an extremely poor peasant family in Qingdoa, a remote commune village in Northern China in 1961. In 1972 Madame Mao, wife of Chairman Mao, decided to revive the Peking Dance Academy and sent men into the countryside to find suitable children to attend. At age eleven, Cunxin, with no former experience, was chosen to become a dancer on the basis of his physique. After seven years of hard, sometimes cruel training at the Beijing Dance Academy, he received one of two artistic scholarships to study in America. The first cultural delegation to China introduced Cunxin to the artistic director of the Houston Ballet Academy, who would become his mentor for the next sixteen years. Cunxin’s book, Mao's Last Dancer, took two and half years to write and has become a huge bestseller in Australia (reaching number one in non-fiction) and is currently on its fourteenth print-run since September, 2003.