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, and Tony Award–winning producer. As a director, he recently opened the Guthrie Theater’s 2025-26 season with George Abud’s play through music, The Ruins, and helmed an immersive presentation, Jake Landau: A Musical Revue, starring Tony Award winner Maleah Joi Moon. He produced Michael R. Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning musical A Strange Loop and the 2023 Broadway revival of Merrily We Roll Along. 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 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.
A former Prince Fellow in Creative Producing at Columbia University and Presidential Fellow at Harvard, 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. Ashruf is the founder of Broadway For All (BFA), the national arts training program which received 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 his debut film, Driver Found, and direct an immersive play he is writing based on interviews with real New Yorkers, The Hierarchy, which takes place 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.