This biographical article is written like a résumé .(October 2023) |
Elysia Segal | |
---|---|
Born | |
Nationality | American |
Education | New York University CUNY School of Professional Studies |
Occupation(s) | Science Communicator, Actress, and Playwright |
Website | http://elysiasegal.com |
Elysia Segal is an American science communicator, actress, and playwright. She has created a number of STEM-based, immersive museum theatre performances for cultural institutions across the United States and is a regular host of programming for the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum and space commentator for NASASpaceflight.com.
Elysia Segal was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and attended Lake Highland Preparatory School in Orlando, Florida. While there, she was a finalist at the NCFL Speech & Debate National Championships [1] and was elected to the Teen Arts Advisory Council for Orlando Mayor Glenda Hood. [2]
Segal also participated in the school's nationally acclaimed ASPIRE Science Research Program, and has since credited this experience as influential to her passion for blending STEM topics with the arts. [3] She was a semifinalist in the Discovery Channel Young Scientist Challenge [4] and won first place at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair [5] with her research project analyzing the use of proteoglycans as a biomarker for congenital hydrocephalus. [6] Main-belt asteroid 17795 Elysiasegal was named for her in recognition of this achievement. [7] [8]
Segal graduated from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts Drama program and studied at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, the CAP21 Musical Theatre Conservatory, Stonestreet Studio's Film & TV Workshop, and at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Ireland. She went on to earn a Masters of Arts in the inaugural class of the Museum Studies program at the CUNY School of Professional Studies, developed in collaboration with the New-York Historical Society.
Segal's performance credits include her portrayal of the performance artist "Maureen" in RENT, The Legend of Flowers (Lincoln Center), George M. Cohan: In His Own Words (Lake Placid Center for the Arts), and The Who's Tommy (DeBaun Center for Performing Arts). [9] [10] She has also made a number of film and television appearances including The Music Never Stopped (Official Selection of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival), [11] Going the Distance , Royal Pains , and Mercy, [12] and has appeared in numerous museum theatre performances at cultural sites across the United States (see § Museum Theatre & Science Communication below).
In 2010, Segal starred as "Gillian" in Together This Time: A New Rock Musical by Andrew Heyman and Zac Kline, [13] a role which she originated at NYU's Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program two years prior. She also appeared in the show's off-Broadway premiere later that summer at the Lucille Lortel Theater. [14] [15]
She also portrayed "Beth II" in Ryan O'Leary's 'Y: The Last Man', [16] a film adapted from the Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra graphic novels of the same name. It premiered at the 2011 Litchfield Hills Film Festival [17] and screened with a Q&A panel at I-CON 30 at Stony Brook University. [18] She received a Best Actress nomination at the 2011 FTC Luminaries for her appearance in Louis Matta's time-travel film The Traveler, which went on to win Audience Favorite Sci-Fi Mini Short in the 2011 ShockerFest International Film Festival. [19]
Segal received a nomination for Outstanding Actress [20] for her performance as "Daisy Miller" in the world premiere of the play Pushing Daisy at the Gene Frankel Theatre. [21] [22] The largely autobiographical piece by playwright and cancer survivor Lauren Epsenhart was the first to be produced by The Pushing Daisy Project, an organization which promotes cancer awareness by showcasing new works. [23] [24]
Writer/director Terence Krey later cast her as "Cassandra Southwick" in his web series pilot Entwined, [25] which won "Best Use of Numerical Element" in Celebrate the Web 5, and then again as "Chloe," the lead in his genre-blending indie-horror-romance feature Not A Monster. [26] They collaborated the next year for Celebrate the Web 6 as well on the steampunk-inspired pilot "The Belle and The Bot," with Segal (also a producer on the project) playing Abigail, the time-traveling Southern belle from the year 1863, and Krey as her tragic robot husband, Edward. [27] The show won "Judge's Choice" and runner up for "Audience Choice" in the competition, and was screened at VidCon 2012. [28] She also co-produced and starred as Penelope in Krey's supernatural dramedy feature film, "Winter Slides." [29]
In 2014, she was cast as the lead in Things I Left on Long Island, a new play by Jonathan Larson Grant recipient Sara Cooper, which premiered at the New York International Fringe Festival. [30] [31] The play was the recipient of the 2014 Fringe Excellence Award for Playwriting [32] and was a TimeOut New York Critics' Pick. [33] She had previously workshopped the play with Cooper at Theater for the New City and Dixon Place. She also workshopped material from Cooper's musical Elevator Heart, music by Amy Burgess, Julia Meinwald and Julianne Wick-Davis.
Segal has researched, written and performed original theatrical shows and experiences for school groups and the public at a number of institutions including the New York Transit Museum, the New-York Historical Society, and the DAR Museum, among others. [34] Her work leans heavily on primary sources and often highlights underrepresented women in history and science such as Victorian citizen scientist turned inventor Mary Walton [35] and 1950s aviation/space pioneer Betty Skelton. [36]
She has created a number of shows for the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York City, including a recreation of a 1940s Armed Forces radio broadcast and a performance about the life of teen aviator Elinor Smith who rose to fame in the 1920s after illegally flying under New York City's East River Bridges. [37] [38] In 2022, she launched a heavily researched one-woman show based on the experiences of Betty Skelton, the first woman to undergo the physical and psychological tests of the Mercury astronaut program. [39] She also oversees the innovative National Endowment for the Humanities research and performance residency Crossing the Line: Bringing History to Life with Teens, in which she guides students in the development of their research, analysis, interpretation and writing skills through their creation of original performance pieces based upon primary and secondary sources. [40]
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, she also hosted a regular live-streaming series for the museum called Intrepid Adventures, and currently produces their monthly streaming series Astro Live in partnership with NASASpaceFlight.com and Kerbal Space Academy. [41] [42]
Segal currently serves as the Vice President of the International Museum Theatre Alliance [43] and speaks regularly at conferences and events about her work in the field. In 2022 she was selected to serve as a NASA Solar System Ambassador, an educational public engagement effort that encourages communication about the science, discoveries, and excitement of NASA's space exploration missions. [44]
Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson is an American avant-garde artist, musician and filmmaker whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. Initially trained in violin and sculpting, Anderson pursued a variety of performance art projects in New York during the 1970s, focusing particularly on language, technology, and visual imagery. She achieved unexpected commercial success when her song "O Superman" reached number two on the UK singles chart in 1981.
Fringe theatre is theatre that is produced outside of the main theatre institutions, and that is often small-scale and non-traditional in style or subject matter. The term comes from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. In London, the fringe are small-scale theatres, many of them located above pubs, and the equivalent to New York's Off-Off-Broadway theatres and Europe's "free theatre" groups.
The New York University Tisch School of the Arts is the performing, cinematic and media arts school of New York University.
Sarah Ruhl is an American playwright, poet, professor, and essayist. Among her most popular plays are Eurydice (2003), The Clean House (2004), and In the Next Room (2009). She has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a distinguished American playwright in mid-career. Two of her plays have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and she received a nomination for Tony Award for Best Play. In 2020, she adapted her play Eurydice into the libretto for Matthew Aucoin's opera of the same name. Eurydice was nominated for Best Opera Recording at the 2023 Grammy Awards.
Zelda Fichandler was an American stage producer, director and educator.
Kat Foster is an American stage and screen actress known for her roles in the TV series 'Til Death, The Unusuals, Your Family or Mine, The Goodwin Games and Jean-Claude Van Johnson among others. She has also starred in films including Fear the Night, Spoonful of Sugar and Rebirth, among others.
Nichola McAuliffe is an English television and stage actress and writer, best known for her role as Sheila Sabatini in the ITV hospital sitcom Surgical Spirit (1989–1995). She has also starred in several stage musicals and won the 1988 Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Musical for her role in Kiss Me, Kate.
Zohra Mumtaz Sehgal was an Indian actress, dancer, and choreographer. Having begun her career as a member of a contemporary dance troupe, she transitioned into acting roles beginning in the 1940s. Sehgal appeared in several British films, television shows, and Bollywood productions in a career that spanned over eight decades.
Melonie Diaz is an American film and television actress who has appeared in many independent films, including four shown at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. She received Independent Spirit Awards nominations for performances in films A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (2006) and Fruitvale Station (2013). From 2018 to 2022, she appeared as the leading role of witch Mel Vera on the remake television series Charmed on The CW.
The Orlando International Fringe Theatre Festival is a 14-day annual arts festival that takes place in Orlando, Florida, every May. The festival features 850 ticketed theatrical performances on indoor and outdoor stages, produced by local, national and international artists. It is an open access performing arts festival, meaning there is no selection committee, and anyone may participate, with any type of performance.
Tobias Segal is an American actor, best known for his work on stage and in the independent film The Other America, which appeared at the SlamDance Film Festival and Philadelphia Film Festival in April 2004. In 2002 he became one of the youngest actors to win a Barrymore Award, which he won for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a play for his performance in Equus. He appeared in The Bridge Project at Kevin Spacey's Old Vic Theatre under the direction of Sam Mendes, followed by a brief Broadway run of The Miracle Worker, before portraying Earl in the John Wick films John Wick: Chapter 2 and John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum. In 2022, Segal portrayed the white version of Donald Glover's Earnest "Earn" Marks in the character's dream episodes of the third season of Atlanta, referred to as "E". He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Nina Arianda Matijcio is an American actress. She won the 2012 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for her performance as Vanda Jordan in Venus in Fur, and she was nominated for the 2011 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for portraying Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday. She stars in Amazon Studios legal series Goliath and starred in the biographical film Stan & Ollie (2018) as Stan Laurel's wife Ida.
Tilly Grimes is a British costume designer for theatre, opera, and film. She works between London, Dublin and New York. She is a guest artist / guest designer at The Juilliard School, New York University, Fordham University, University of Rochester, The Curtis Institute and Trinity College Dublin. She is co-artistic director of London/Parisian Theatre Company SavageCharm.
Deborah Pearson is a British, Hungarian and Canadian live artist, playwright, director, performer and curator based in London, U.K. and born in Toronto, Canada. She holds a practice-based PhD in narrative in contemporary performance from Royal Holloway, University of London, where she was a Reid Scholar. Her dissertation was supervised by playwright Dan Rebellato.
Tina Huang is an American stage and television actress of Taiwanese descent known for her recurring roles in Rizzoli & Isles and for her semi-regular role as Melinda Trask on the NBC soap Days of Our Lives.
Sarah Swenson is an American modern dance choreographer, dancer, and teacher. She trained in early modern dance forms, and later studied postmodern dance. She began her career in the late 1980s in New York City. Swenson began as a student and later, a teacher at the Alvin Ailey School, and was Rehearsal Director and Performance Coach for the Alvin Ailey Student Performance Group, for which she created her first works. She was also the Associate Artistic Director of Seraphim Dance Theatre, founded by the late Raymond C. Harris.
Katherine "Katie" Cappiello is an American playwright, director, feminist, teacher, activist and public speaker best known for her plays Slut and Now That We're Men. Gloria Steinem called Slut "truthful, raw and immediate!" and David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker called it "vital, moving, and absolutely necessary". Cappiello is the creator, writer and executive producer of Grand Army.
Niamh Shaw is an Irish scientist, engineer, STEM communicator, writer, and performer.
Suzann Victor is a Singaporean contemporary artist based in Australia whose practice spans installation, painting, and performance art. Victor is most known for her public artworks and installations that examine ideas of disembodiment, the postcolonial, and the environmental in response to space, context and architecture.
Janet Munsil is a Canadian playwright based in Victoria, British Columbia. She is most noted for her plays That Elusive Spark and Be Still. Munsil is also a theatre director and has served as artistic director of Intrepid Theatre and the Victoria Fringe Festival.