Since 2015, she’s also been the artistic director at Columbus-based Available Light Theatre, where she helps shape the vision of the company’s artistic works. Papaleonardos chooses the plays the company performs, hires directors, and makes original work. Additionally, she continues to act — including in a recent Denison student-directed production, The Wolves.
Papaleonardos understands what goes into staging a production, including acting, directing, design, and how all those areas utilize time and space onstage. At Denison, she teaches all of the elements that go into making a production, and has an innate sense for, as she puts it, “helping students into the work.” Some students may be holding tension and need to loosen up. Others have excess energy that needs to be harnessed. Years of watching and teaching students have helped her pinpoint ways to help them improve.
One of her most popular classes is Elements of Acting, which is frequented by both theatre majors and minors and by students who are acting for the very first time. It’s one of her favorite classes.
The skills students learn in that class apply to life in general, no matter where their career path might lead. “Ultimately, it’s about getting comfortable being uncomfortable in your own body, in front of other people, while speaking,” she said. “We need that wherever we go.”
She shared the story of a former student who returned to visit, poking his head into an ongoing class and telling her students, “Listen to her!” Then he talked to them about how he used Papaleonardos’s classroom advice about “reorienting the room” in a successful job interview.
“It was one of my pinnacle teaching moments,” Papaleonardos said. “The flexibility and creativity you have to come up with at the moment can translate to so many different realms.”