Baba Rose creates compelling, rigorous, whimsically fun art across the stage, screen, and beyond which enhances the human spirit and reminds us all how strange and precious this life is.
Osh Ashruf Founder & Artist
Osh is a director, writer, producer, and creative consultant. As a director, he recently opened the Guthrie Theater’s 2025-26 season with the world premiere of George Abud’s The Ruins: a play through music (Winner of the 2025 BroadwayWorld Best New Play or Musical) and helmed an immersive presentation, Jake Landau: A Musical Revue, starring Tony Award winner Maleah Joi Moon. He earned two Tony Awards as Producer of both Michael R. Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning musical A Strange Loop and the 2023 Broadway revival of Merrily We Roll Along, starring Daniel Radcliffe and Jonathan Groff. He is subsequently a producer of the film: Merrily We Roll Along, which can be streamed on Netflix and Apple+. Other directing credits include: 24 Hour Plays (Broadway); The Gaza Monologues (Noor Theatre); Greg T. Nanni’s Love Among Dreamers (The House).
As a writer, he is a co-creator of the Drama League Award–nominated interactive game-show play American Dreams and he has acted in The Vagrant Trilogy (The Public Theater), My Friend Will (Tribeca TV Festival) and the film All We Had, directed by and starring Katie Holmes. As Creative Producer, he has worked on Guggenheim Fellow César Alvarez’ musical NOISE and is currently working on Isabel Monk Cade’s My Way, a solo-show extravaganza about a serial morning-after pill-popper. Osh started his producing journey as Associate Producer at the Frederick Zollo Company, where he helped develop projects like the musical Sing Street, and the film, TILL, among others.
A former Prince Fellow in Creative Producing at Columbia University, Presidential Fellow at Harvard, and graduate of the Broadway League’s Commercial Theater Institute, he holds degrees from Loyola University Chicago and an M.F.A. from Harvard University and the Moscow Art Theater. Before committing to a lifetime in the arts, Osh taught for five years in NYC public schools as a proud Teach For America alum. Osh is the founder of Broadway For All (BFA), the national arts training program which received the 2022 Tony Award Honors for Excellence in the Theatre. He is a TEDxBroadway speaker alum and currently sits on the National Board of Artspace, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit building affordable housing for artists and entrepreneurs nationwide.
UPCOMING: Osh will direct: Driver Found, his debut film; Area D, an arabic-dual-language-pop-electric musical at NQT/HERE Arts; and The Hierarchy, an immersive pentology play cycle he is writing, based on interviews in the style of Studs Terkel, with real New Yorkers in five NYC apartment units in one building.
A Jersey native, Justin was introduced to film by his mother who once worked as a publicist, and became truly passionate for the medium after experiencing the 2002 Wuxia classic Hero as one of his very first movies. A born storyteller, Wachtel did policy research and wrote articles for Citizens for a Better Flathead while having a short stint in Kalispell, Montana—an experience that cracked the East coast camera view that had previously surrounded him. Wachtel studied film at the University of Colorado-Boulder, where disciples of the late Phil Solomon and Stan Brakhage exploded his ideas of the possibilities of the medium of cinema and solidified his obsession of subconscious exploration. Justin has worked on numerous productions in various roles ranging from shorts to independent features, to major studio films and TV series. He is currently developing multiple projects with his peers and through the production company, Baba Rose.