Ostensibly, her passion is theatre. She’s been an actress, playwright, director, stage manager, props mistress, and backstage hand. She is now Director of Education for the Theatre Development Fund in New York City, where she develops and carries out programs to introduce children from New York City schools to live theatre. The Fund provides tickets to middle and high school students, workshops coordinated with school curricula, and playwriting programs. It also supports a quarterly newsletter and special playbills written by students. Its most innovative program is Open Doors, in which students from underserved high schools are teamed with New York directors, stage managers, and producers to attend and discuss a series of professional productions throughout the school year.

Beyond theatre, Marianna has another passion. “I love giving kids opportunities to be successful,” she has said. She has taught in institutions ranging from the Dalton School in New York to mental hospitals and schools for special education. Most recently, she has become involved in schools in Tanzania. For a month in 2003, she taught English in a primary school there and “fell in love.” Since then, she has organized exchange programs with the Akeri Secondary School in Tanzania and the DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, will lead a pilot theatre workshop in Tanzania this summer, and is involved in the planning of a new secondary school to be established outside Dar Esalaam.

The Margaret Bailey Speer Award is given to someone “whose accomplishments . . . bring credit to her or him and also to the Shipley School.” Marianna has been given awards for excellence and special achievement by the Broadway Theater Institute and the New York State Theater Education Association. She has been formally commended by the Tanzanian Ambassador to the United Nations.

More important, the Speer Award is given to someone “whose deeds have helped to make the community stronger and freer; who has in some way helped to lessen prejudice, intolerance, and injustice.” For the last thirty years, Marianna has, through her energy and passion, through her love for the theatre, strengthened the children she serves, freed their imaginations, and given them access to a world which would otherwise be closed to them. It is for these achievements, and for the courage and grace with which she has carried them out, that we give her the Margaret Bailey Speer Award, in the certainty that Miss Speer, who “graduated” with her class, would approve.