The Poet was born in the coastal plains of the southern United States, in a basket, where he learned to eat raw crawdads straight from the bayou. Having been mistaken for cargo aboard an oil tanker, he arrived in the Middle East, where, as a teenager, he interned for the Sultan of Turkey. During this time, he learned the twin arts of carpet-weaving and nargila-smoking. The Poet presently resides in Beijing, China, where he has entered into martial arts training at Shaolin temple. During his free time, unbeknownst to his master, he often sneaks off to nearby parks to take his latent aggression out on stray cats. He clearly needs more training.

Lynskies was hurriedly squirted out on the sterile streets of Singapore before being freighted to Hong Kong at a young and impressionable age. Her childhood years were wiled away naming her body parts in Tigalog and tape recording pigeons’ conversations. Years later, after committing road-kill in Australia and villager-corruption in India, she is currently seeking sanctuary from persecution by McGill University officials in Beijing.

Cari Kornblit has had a fruitful acting career thus far, starring in such blockbusters as Hurricane Smith and the Garden of the Golden Monkey. You may recognize her performance by her signature line: "Linda Zest is not a girl. Linda Zest is a woman!" Less well-known productions include Brighton Beach Memoirs, Romeo and Juliet, and Dangerous Liaisons. Unfortunately her brief stint on Broadway was due to her Swing dancing ability and not her acting. Since she would rather play on stage than memorize lines, Cari is thrilled to be a part of Beijing Improv. A former scientist, now turned writer, Cari tries to work as little as possible so that she can enjoy all that Beijing has to offer. She does however wish that the language fairy would visit already so that she could wake up one morning fluent in Mandarin.

Matt Planchak thinks it was great having Biology with you this year. He says to stay cool, and maybe the two of you can hang out this summer..

Andreas  Julseth came to Beijing to take a much needed break from his favorite Norwegian pastimes: sailing, pillaging, and listening to black metal. Being this far away from the sea has left this poor Viking in a permanently confused state that sometimes adds, but in most cases impedes, the progress of Beijing Improv. Andreas is an irredeemable traveler who never quite gets enough. He has worked with TV and film since finishing film school and finds that work and adventures force him to crisscross the globe. He now hangs his hat here in Beijing, working as a writer for a US company. In his spare time, Andreas enjoys getting naked in nature.

Ryan Foley started her acting career doing impersonations of 80's rock stars. She also had a short stint as "Sara" in the much-acclaimed period piece A Chronicle of Corpses. As well as her acting career was going, when she woke up from a beer induced haze after four years at Dartmouth College, she realized that she would need to make some money ―pretending to be Cindy Lauper just wouldn't cut it! So, Ryan tried her hand at something serious... marketing research. In order to maintain some level of sanity, Ryan took improv classes for a year at Second City in Chicago. Eventually the cubicles got to her and that's when she fled to China. Here in her sanctuary from cubicle-land, she is very excited to be a part of Beijing Improv, spreading joy to those expats who may not have been so lucky. 

Neema Moraveji (Chinese translation: Moraveji Your Mother) claims street cred time and time again by wearing his Beijing Improv t-shirt now that he's relocated back to the US.  Just in case anybody doubts him, he lives life in a constant game of "Yes, and" which has gotten him into a fair amount of trouble now that he lives in San Francisco. 
 

Joshua Spencer Halpern

Originally from New York, Joshua has lived and worked in Spain, Central America, England and now Beijing, China. In Spain, he worked as an academic adviser for the Fulbright Commission and founded Idiomarts Education, S.L., which provided language education services through theater, film, juggling, painting, magic and music for young adults and professionals in Madrid.   He managed a Georgetown University project funded by USAID to provide scholarships for rural community leaders throughout Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Haiti; led community service summer programs in Costa Rica for U.S. high school students; and managed the high school life-skills programs for Identity, Inc. for vulnerable Latino youth outside of Washington, D.C.. He is an advisory board member at Hua Dan, a Chinese organization focused on empowering migrant construction and service industry workers through theater, communications and self-identity programs. He is also a founding member of the Beijiing Improv Troupe.

Joshua holds a B.F.A. from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts in Theater, a TEFL certificate from Cambridge University, and a graduate certificate in Business Administration from Georgetown University. He is currently working toward his dual-EMBA degree from INSEAD and Tsinghua University.