Meet the Faculty

Teri Loretto-Valentik

Teri Loretto-Valentik, Coordinator

Teri holds a Bachelor’s of Arts and a Master’s Degree from the University of Ottawa. She is an award-winning actress, writer and director with a background in stage and production management. She has written for magazines, newspapers, online formats, theatre and film. She works regularly for CBC Ottawa in both radio and television as producer, writer and host. She has appeared in feature films, worked as a professional musician and toured as a children’s entertainer. Her voice can be heard in cartoons, commercials and in various documentaries. Theatre directing credits include Phil Porter’s Blink, Zastrozzi and Theatre of the Film Noir by George F. Walker, for which she also did the set design. Onstage roles include the title role in the one woman show Shirley Valentine, Masha in Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, and she has written or adapted and directed over a dozen radio shows for live performance (War of the Worlds, Voices From the Front). She has been the artist in residence for the Canadian Centre for Gender and Sexual Diversity and serves as Vice President on the ACTRA Ottawa board. She also teaches in Television Broadcasting and Performing Arts at the college. She is a member of EQUITY, Canadian Media Guild and The Playwrights Guild of Canada. You can find her online @Lorettosweather and https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2057896/

Rick Kaulbars Rick Kaulbars, Professor

Rick has been working as a writer for film and television for over twenty years. As co-writer on the Comedy Network’s cult TV series, Kevin Spencer (1997-2005), he wrote over 40 half-hours of the (at that time) longest running situation-based comedy in Canadian television. Rick was also a voice on most episodes. Rick’s written for such internationally respected series as For Better or for Worse, White Fang and Toad Patrol. In digital media, Rick wrote for and appeared in the Macromedia Award winning interactive digital drama Midnight Stranger for Animatics Corp. and in the summer of 2013 was the voice of Fred Flintstone for a game app produced by Wave Generation of Montreal.

Rick’s strength is his humour and he worked for several years as a stand-up comic for Yuk Yuks. In 2014 he performed stand-up with Kids in the Hall’s Kevin McDonald and also performs with his improv comedy team, Stairlift to Heaven. Onscreen, Rick has appeared with Colin Mochrie in the CBC series Getting Along Famously, playing the tyrannical head of the CBC. Onstage, he starred in the 2011 Fringe Festival production Satanic Panic (a play written by one of his student graduates) and, more recently, played an 1800s pimp in the 2014 Fringe production Finished Girls, which he also wrote.

He wrote his first feature film Two’s A Mob for award-winning director Derek Diorio and self-produced a feature film, Hell Gig about life on the road as a stand-up comic. Presently he continues to generate projects, having a television series under option with TSB Productions, a popular ad campaign for Dymon Storage screening in theatres across Ontario, and is co-producing a radio-drama with CKCU based on his Fringe Show.

Laurie FyffeLaurie Fyffe, Professor

LAURIE FYFFE is a playwright, dramaturg, and actor. Throughout the summer of 2022, Laurie has been a dramaturg and writing mentor with Ottawa Youth Infringement Festival and her short play The Ring was produced by PlanB Productions (paired with Chekhov’s The Proposal) at the 2022 Ottawa Fringe. Laurie’s most recent play; Beowulf In Afghanistan was presented online at the 2021 Ottawa Fringe Festival and is scheduled for a workshop with the Great Canadian Theatre Company in the fall of 2022. Her play, Exciting Cause, will premiere in collaboration with TACTICS in the spring of 2023. Other plays have been produced at the Tarragon Theatre, Factory Theatre, Blyth Festival, and Theatre Kingston. From 2014 to 2017, Laurie was Managing Artistic Director of Ottawa StoryTellers (OST), where she adapted James Bartleman’s Raisin Wine (2014), and co-wrote A Winter Tale: The Journey of the Blind Harper (2015). In March of 2018, Laurie’s play Mirage: The Arabian Adventure of Gertrude Bell received a reading as part of Alumnae Theatre’s New Ideas Festival, and Being Helen received a workshop and public reading courtesy of the Ergo Pink Arts Festival. Laurie’s short play In Kabul premiered at New Theatre of Ottawa’s 2012 Short Play Festival and was subsequently produced at InspiraTo in Toronto, and the Short & Sweet Festival in Sydney, Australia. In 2010, Laurie received her MA in Theatre from the University of Ottawa, where she subsequently taught the Principles of Play Analysis. Since the fall of 2017, Laurie has taught Scriptwriting for Actors at Algonquin College, School of Media Design. Laurie is a member of Canadian Actors’ Equity (CAEA) and the Playwrights Guild of Canada (PG).