Oliver with Concordia University

Throughout 2024, storyteller Megan Wells hired Distant Era to create portraits of the historical women she plays. At the end of that year, Megan additionally became a professor at the theatre program at Concordia University Chicago. Now in 2025, Megan needed a photographer to capture the production of Oliver she’d directed for the university, and I’m so grateful she reached out to me.

Storyteller Megan Wells as: Abigail Adams, Florence Nightingale, Eleanor Roosevelt, Mary Magdalene, Nannerl Mozart, Clara Barton, and Miep Gies.

We made the photos after a performance of the show, just prior to its closing night. It was my great pleasure to collaborate with my friend Megan on her directorial debut at Concordia University. I’m so proud of her for all she’s accomplished in the last year, and I can’t wait to see how she continues to build the theatre program. Megan is one of the most engaging people I’ve ever spoken with, and our conversations over the past year have often been deep ones about life and story. Megan did a wonderful job putting together this show, and I’m honored that she invited me to capture it for her.

A thousand thanks, Megan, and hearty congratulations on your great success!

Selected photos from Concordia University’s *Oliver*.

Cast, Crew, and Summary

The following information about the show appears on the Brown Paper Tickets website’s listing for Oliver:

Produced by Jeff-Award winning director Megan Wells and music director Peter Stigdon, Concordia students, alum, staff and faculty create a joyous ensemble. In the versatile Bergmann theater, Garet Pahlkotter’s set surrounds the audience for an engaging immersive experience. Lights by student Will Gmitro pop the musical with mood and color. The fun choreography is also student created by Tati Overton. The set painting is created by Wren Nuckles. All held together by the stage management glue of student Eric Perry.

Alum Emil Clausing creates a quirky and heartful Fagin matched with Walther Academy student Andy Leininger’s warm and charismatic Oliver. The terrific cast includes students, staff and faculty: Evalynn Berg, Madison Blodgett, Mahima Gangwar, Nathan Gorman, Michael Hadler, Anton Jones, Joey Jurca, Harrison Mueller, Tati Overton, Abigail Porter, Christina Ray, Anika Slayton, Peter Stigdon, Marlena Tomaczyk, Rayna Wangler and Hannah Weber. We are joined by three students from local schools; Aria Ames, Evelyn Fierro and Evelyn Oas.

Bravo to Megan Wells and to Oliver‘s cast and crew!

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Steven Townshend is a fine art/portrait photographer and writer with a background in theatre, written narrative, and award-winning game design. As a young artist, Steven toured the US and Canada performing in Shakespeare companies while journaling their moments on paper and film. In his transition from stage to page, Steven continued to work as a theatre photographer, capturing dramatic scenes while incorporating elements of costume, makeup, and theatrical lighting in his work. Drawn to stories set in other times and places, Steven creates works through which fellow dreamers and time travelers might examine their own humanity or find familiar comfort in the reflections of the people and places of a distant era.

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I’m Steven Townshend—your guide, scribe, editor, and humble narrator. The All Worlds Traveller is my personal publication, an exploratory conversation about stories and how we interact with them, from photographs to narratives to games—a kind of variety show in print. It is a conversation with other artists who explore the past, the future, and the fantastical in their work. Not one world—but all worlds. Where Distant Era shows stories in images, The All Worlds Traveller is all about the words.

Distant Era creates fine art and portrait photographs of people and places from imagined pasts, possible futures, and magical realities. In collaboration with other artists, we evoke these distant eras with theatrical costume and makeup, evocative scenery, and deliberate lighting, and we enhance them with contemporary tools to cast these captured moments in the light of long ago or far away. We long to walk the lion-decorated streets of Babylon, to visit alien worlds aboard an interstellar vessel, and to observe the native dances of elves. Our images are windows to speculative realities and postcards from the past. They are consolation for fellow time travelers who long to look beyond the familiar scenery of the present and gaze upon the people and places of a distant era.