Meet The Team
Company Member
Vasanth J. Santosham
Vasanth J. Santosham is an actor, director, and educator with over fifteen years of experience, trained at the Moscow Art Theatre School in the Stanislavsky tradition. A co-founder of Studio Six Theater Company, he has created and performed original work across the United States and internationally, collaborating with artists from Europe, Russia, and North America.
As an educator, Santosham specializes in ensemble-based training that integrates voice, movement, and text analysis, with a focus on devised work and the etude process. His teaching emphasizes presence, responsiveness, and creative risk, preparing actors and directors to create work that is immediate, collaborative, and alive. He has taught at institutions including Butler University and the Moscow Art Theatre School, and developed outreach programs expanding access to theatre education.
Company Member
Nicole Kontolefa
Nicole is a theater artist and educator.. Raised in the Lower East Side in a bilingual, immigrant household, she graduated from the Moscow Art Theatre and co-founded Studio Six. Her adaptation of I Am Me was invited to the Golden Mask Festival and won the Grand Prix at the Kolyada New Plays Festival.
Nicole devises and facilitates workshops that use theater as a forum for dialogue and change. She has received grants from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Brooklyn Arts Council, and Wyoming Humanities and Arts Councils, and her writing on applied theater has been published in Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Journal and etudes. She has taught with Food Bank For New York City, Grand St. Settlement, Greenwich House, NY Memory Center, the NYC Department of Corrections, Theatre in Tandem, Butler University. Nicole also works with the applied theatre collective she co-founded - Journey Theatre Project.
Company Member
Adam James Muskin
Actor, musician, and radio host Adam James Muskin originally hails from New York City, where dreams of working in stage and film from his earliest years guided his unusual path to Russia.
After graduating from The LaGuardia High School for the Performing Arts in 2000, he moved to Moscow to join an experimental four-year conservatory acting program at the Moscow Art Theater School. There he graduated first as an actor in 2005 from the American course of Mikhail Lobanov and Oleg Tabakov, and once again in 2010 with a Master’s Degree in Theater Art with the careful assistance and guidance of the school’s rector Anatoly Smeliansky.
As an actor and founding member of the Studio Six Theater Company, Adam has filled multiple roles both independently and within the company, serving as actor, translator, director, and teaching assistant with several of Russia’s premiere theater artists. Adam has led seminars on acting and Chekhov at The Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York, as well as at Skidmore University.
Adam also worked as a radio host for 12 years on two continents, eventually gaining cult popularity across Russia on the country’s number one contemporary rock station “Radio Maximum”.
After successfully cultivating a dynamic career in Russia for 20 years, Adam made the difficult but moral choice to leave and start anew in his native New York after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Adam is a proud member of Studio Six, and hopes one day to help pass on the knowledge and love of theater he gained in his time at the Moscow Art Theater School.