Our Team

Anna Pappas

Artistic Director

Anna Pappas’ experience stems from over 25 years of work as an actor on stage, in film and in television. She founded Ergo Arts Theatre in the early 90’s and has had the honour of collaborating with many of Canada’s finest talent. She has worked as a director, producer and actor in the company’s West End Reading Series, bringing classics and new works to the stage. Her work in the indy theatre scene has been recognized at the Toronto Fringe Festival – Ergo Arts’ production of Breaking Character was chosen Patron’s Pick and Buckle My Shoe was selected as one of NOW Magazine’s Fringe Favourites (Outstanding Production and Outstanding Ensemble) . 

By the early 2000’s, Anna began programming and outreach to include Theatre for Young Audiences, with productions like the province-wide tour of Billy Bishop Goes to War and workshop production of Choose a children’s musical about the environment. Development work on multilingual text such as Antigone, Lysistrata, Ithaki, Seferis-Kipling, An Evening of Ritsos, to name a few,  expanded the company’s reach into the Hellenic Community.  

Ms Pappas has a long history of championing women and their work. In 2018, she initiated Ergo Pink Fest, a theatre festival promoting the works of women artists and artists of marginalized gender identities. Supported by the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts, the festival launched in March 2018 and is now in its third year.

Nastasia Pappas-Kemps

Director of Pink

Nastasia’s work in acting, writing and filmmaking began at a very early age as she played Phebe (As You Like It) in the Upper Canada Repertory Company’s production of Her Infinite Variety: A Night of Shakespeare when she was only twelve. From there, her association with the UCRC only blossomed as she played a variety of roles with the company over the span of 10 years, ranging from Piggy in Lord of the Flies to The Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland.

Most recently she co-wrote and starred in an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility for the UCRC which sold out the Alumnae Theatre’s Studio Space.

Nastasia has also been an active participant in Toronto’s indie music scene as part of the four-piece all-girl rock band Pins & Needles, and more recently a two piece band Romeo Romeo. She has performed at an array of venues and festivals around the city, most notably the Horseshoe Tavern, Silver Dollar, and the Field Trip Festival.

With Ergo Arts Theatre, she worked with writer Alexis Bernier to co-write her Fringe debut Buckle My Shoe. She continued her work with EAT as a writer, spearheading a reading series of Sherlock Holmes adaptations, as well as workshopping many original works with the company. In 2015, Nastasia was a student in Concordia University’s playwriting program. She is currently enrolled in her second year at George Brown Theatre School’s Acting Program.

Angelo Rizacos

Associate Director, Hellenic Liaison

Angelo brings decades of acclaimed work in theatre, film, television, and radio drama to the team.  As an actor he has been nominated for both ACTRA and Dora Mavor Moore awards. As a facilitator/coach for the Toronto chapter of the Classical Theatre Lab he encouraged actors to look to Greek Classical Theatre as well as Shakespeare for inspiration.  His association with Anna began with Ergo Arts (Skazmos) Theatre’s bilingual staged reading of Antigone in 2008.   He then collaborated with Anna on a bilingual translation of Lysistrata and directed excerpts of this work at the Danforth Music Hall. Over the subsequent years he directed works by poet John Ritsos and annual theatrical presentations commemorating the heroic and tragic events of the 1973 student sit-in at the Athens Polytechnic protesting the then military dictatorship in Greece.