Casey Hayes-Deats

Casey Hayes-Deats is not always acting, but she is always an actor. After graduating from Stella Adler in 2012, she founded The Cake Shop theater company and self-produced projects, including the NY premiere of Martin Crimp’s translation of Pains of Youth. Her desire to more deeply explore her conviction that theater is a powerful tool for education and community building led her to earn her masters from CUNY in Applied Theatre, where her thesis project involved creating original theater with both professional actors and seniors with dementia. After several years of working in arts education, her desire to better understand non-profit financial statements led her to earn her MBA from GWU. Now Casey serves as the general manager of the Contemporary American Theater Festival (CATF), teaches courses in arts entrepreneurship and creativity at GWU, and parents her highly imaginative children. The curiosity, empathy, and discipline she learned at Adler inform the way she moves through the world.