Stephanie Diaz is an actor, puppeteer and educator who relocated to Chicago from the west coast four years ago this fall. Since arriving in the midwest, she has had the good fortune to work with Kansas City Rep, Teatro Vista, Remy Bumppo, ShawChicago, First Stage Milwaukee, Drury Lane Oak Brook, Victory Gardens, Mixed Blood Theatre (Minneapolis), American Theatre Company and Teatro Luna. Her west coast credits include work at Seattle Rep, Shakespeare Santa Cruz, The Magic Theatre (SF), The Village Theatre (Seattle) and 5th Avenue Theatre (Seattle). She is a proud member of Actors' Equity Association.
As a teaching artist, Stephanie has taught for Seattle Children's Theatre, Intiman Theatre, 5th Avenue Theatre, Old Globe Theatre (San Diego), Auditorium Theatre (Chicago) and is currently on the teaching roster for Lookingglass Theatre. She especially enjoys working with urban, ethnically-diverse student populations and strives to empower young people to find and use their own voices-- whether as writers, actors, visual artists, musicians or just all-around good human beings. She hopes to develop a Bunraku-based puppetry class for young people in the next year or so.
As a puppeteer, Stephanie was trained by Jean Enticknap of Thistle Theatre (Seattle), where she was a company member for several years and was commissioned to write and perform in the company's first-ever bilingual (English/Spanish) show. She specializes in the Bunraku style, but has performed rod and shadow puppetry as well. She went on to perform in Seattle's wildly-popular adult puppet extravaganza, Frankenocchio, with Monkey Wrench Puppet Lab. This summer, she had the excellent good fortune to perform with Blair Thomas and Company in the critically-acclaimed A Rabbit's Tale, set to a live piano performance of Modest Mussourgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" in Millennium Park.
Stephanie is proud to be a first-generation Guatemalan-American. Born at Quantico Station to the US Marine Corps' first Latin American woman officer, she was raised on the beautiful Monterey Peninsula with her mom, with frequent time spent in Charlottesville, VA, with her dad. She is a practicing Buddhist and yogini, and lives in the Edgewater neighborhood with her Norwegian-American fiancé and their four cats. This fall, she will complete the BA in Theatre from UCSD (by way of DePaul University and Truman College!) that she abandoned 10 years ago to work professionally on stage and in the classroom. It's never too late!
She is in love with the Windy City and looks forward to raising tri-lingual, "Guate-wegian" kids in this great city. She is immensely grateful to Ann Filmer and Tanya Saracho for the opportunity to work on Kita y Fernanda.
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