Stephanie Jean Lane is a New York City-based performer, director, and writer. She hails from Milford, CT, where she trained at the Lee Lund Studio of Dance under the instruction of Broadway dancer Lee Lund. Lane grew up watching her father, Colin Lane, act on stages around the country. She danced and studied theater through her years at Columbia and Barnard College, and continued dancing professionally after graduating, working with Jenny Rocha & her Painted Ladies in late-night cabarets around Brooklyn and Manhattan.
Lane graduated with her MFA in Acting from NYU’s Graduate Acting Program, then alternated the roles of witch-goddess Hecate (the lady in red) and Agnes DeWinter in Punchdrunk’s long-running immersive production, Sleep No More, at the McKittrick Hotel in NYC from 2018-2022. She played Regan opposite Patrick Page’s Lear in King Lear, directed by Simon Godwin at Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., and this year she played Gabriella in Barrington Stage Company's Boeing Boeing, directed by Julianne Boyd, and Valerie in Berkshire Theatre Group's production of Conor McPherson's The Weir, directed by Eric Hill. She worked with director Hector Prats, playing a music video director driven to extremes in his award-winning short film, Enloquecer, which went to Palm Springs International Film Fest and the Bushwick Film Festival, among others. Lane is a member of Society Theatre, with whom she collaborates to create new work in research-driven processes. Their newest piece, grown out of research on quantum entanglement, will premiere in 2025.
Lane’s first short film, Fort Trumbull, starring her dad, won Best Narrative Short Film at the Mystic Film Festival and was a selection of the Bridgeport Film Fest and the New Haven International Film Fest. She wrote and directed the play Sweat Spot 101 with Diana Ramirez for four of her grad school classmates at the Paul Walker Theater in NYC, and her dance/theater/film collaboration with Sarah Todes and Kyra Sims, my unfinished girl, won a grant to be produced at the cell theater in NYC. Lane toured a collaboratively devised play about Timothy Leary’s experiments with LSD to the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh and produced her own original dance-theater adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse at LaMaMa ETC and Dixon Place in Manhattan, The Brick in Brooklyn, and in Shanghai.
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She teaches acting, movement, and voice at New York Film Academy, and coaches privately.
LATELY . . .
THE WEIR AT BERKSHIRE THEATRE GROUP
Played Valerie in Conor McPherson's The Weir, directed by Eric Hill at Berkshire Theatre Group. September-October, 2024. Pictured with Harry Smith, Sean Bridgers, and Philip Themio Stoddard.
BOEING BOEING at BARRINGTON STAGE CO.
Played Gabriella, Italian stewardess in the swinging 1960s, in Barrington Stage Company's Boeing Boeing, directed by founding artistic director, Julianne Boyd. July-August 2024, Pittsfield, MA. Pictured here with Chis Innvar, photo by Daniel Rader.
KING LEAR
Played Regan opposite Patrick Page as Lear in Shakespeare Theatre Company's King Lear, directed by Simon Godwin, in Washington D.C.
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Peter Marks of The Washington Post said it was "one of the best versions of the tragedy I’ve ever seen. Maybe even the best.”
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The production smashed sales records at STC's box office and extended three times.
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Photo by DJ Corey.
SOCIETY THEATRE COMPANY
Joined Society Theatre as one of four new members in their third season. Currently engaged in research, development, and rehearsal toward company's third full-length production.
ENLOQUECER
Short of the Week & Vimeo Staff Pick, October 2022. WATCH HERE.
"As Enloquecer’s lead-character, Stephanie Jean Lane is remarkably compelling and as she takes us on this 11-minute emotional roller coaster, at any given moment she embodies a bunch of conflicting emotions and feelings. It’s the authenticity of her performance that makes the tone of the film land and allows the comedy to thrive without turning into a one-dimensional farce." - Céline Roustan, Short of the Week
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OFFICIAL SELECTION:
Palm Springs International Film Festival's ShortFest 2022
Nighthawk Shorts Fest 2022, Bushwick Film Fest, Crown Heights Film Fest, Tacoma Film Fest
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Played the lead, Ela, opposite Bob Rutan in this short film written, directed, and edited by Hector Prats, produced by Yoko Kohmoto, and Kaelo Iyizoba, and shot by Michael Cong.
SLEEP NO MORE
Stephanie Jean Lane as Hecate in Sleep No More.
Photo by Umi Akiyoshi.
Alternately played Hecate and Agnes in Punchdrunk's long-running immersive adaptation of Macbeth at the McKittrick Hotel, between 2018-2022.
FORT TRUMBULL
Winner: Best Narrative Short at the 2021 Mystic Film Fest;
Semi-finalist, Best First Time Director: LA's Indie Shorts Fest;
Official Selection: Bridgeport Film Festival, New Haven Internat'l Film Fest
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Short film written, directed and produced by Stephanie Jean Lane; Filmed in Milford, CT in February 2021.
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Watch here: Fort Trumbull on Vimeo
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A man retraces his footsteps along a stretch of Long Island Sound each day during the winter of COVID, bumping into familiar faces as he goes. A meditation on isolation, memory, community, and loss, woven with text from Dylan Thomas' "A Child's Christmas in Wales," and dotted with humor.
Featuring Colin Lane, Dennis Manzi, Nancy A. Herman, Rebecca Zaretzky, Larry Kirwan, and Stephanie Jean Lane.
DP: Jordan Anstatt; Sound: Benjamin Eckersley
1st AD: Alison Wein; 2nd AD: Ra Williams
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Poster by Rebecca Haden
MY UNFINISHED GIRL
Stephanie Jean Lane as Matilda Do-Right Do-Right in "My Unfinished Girl."
CO-CREATED and PERFORMED "My Unfinished Girl," a devised dance/music/digital art theater piece exploring the unfinished in life, with Kyra Sims and Sarah Todes. Workshopped at The Carriage House in Stamford, NY in August 2021. NYC premiere at The Cell Theatre in Chelsea, October 16, 2021 made possible by a $5000 grant from the New York Artist Corps through NYFA.
THE MOTHERHOOD PROJECT
DIRECTED staged reading of Christy Escobar's new play, "The Motherhood Project," featuring Escobar, Marinda Anderson, Rosa Gilmore, Keren Lugo, Kedren Spencer, and Sarah Todes, at The Cell Theatre in Chelsea, October 7, 2021.
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Poster artwork by Christy Escobar.
FOR SOCIETY THEATRE'S "CHEAP DATE"
2020-2021
Caroline Grogan, Shpend Xani, and Rosa Gilmore in :"Dayna."
WROTE "Dayna," 10 minute play for Zoom directed by Paul Pontrelli, about three former restaurant co-workers reuniting to remember a bartender they worked with. December, 2020.
Jose Maria Aguilar, Grant Harrison and Danielle Skraastad in "Dannon"
DIRECTED "Dannon" by Tim Nicolai, 10 minute play for Zoom about a small group of rabble-rousing Democrats trying to match Q-Anon in passion and disinformation in the 2020 political maelstrom. Nov, 2020.
Annie Fox and Joshua David Robinson in "Roulette"
WROTE AND DIRECTED "Roulette," 10 minute play for Zoom featuring Annie Fox, Joshua David Robinson, and Brian Bock, about connecting with a stranger on the world wide web in isolated times. September, 2020.
Leslie Fray and Rosa Gilmore in "Algorithms"
WROTE "Algorithms," 10 minute play for Zoom featuring Leslie Fray, Rosa Gilmore, and Christy Escobar, directed by Violeta Picayo, about conversations with friends surrounding race, privilege and the information we do and don't receive from social media. July, 2020.
DIRECTED "Quinoa Court Town Hall" by Christy Escobar, 10 minute play for Zoom (with puppets) about the unwieldy task of teaching kids about protesting within the context of the Black Lives Matter movement. June, 2020.
SWEAT SPOT 101 WITH DIANA RAMIREZ
With (L to R) Rachel Claire, Rosa Gilmore, Keren Lugo, and Jin Ha
Lighting by Derek Van Heel
Written and directed by Stephanie Jean Lane
Presented in December 2015 by NYU Grad Acting's Freeplay Festival
1 Act Play, 60 min
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Winter, 2015: Three students and one instructor gather every Wednesday night for a community dance-aerobics class in a small Connecticut town. When private lives spill into the dance moves and personal traumas are aired, how does the group reconfigure to make room for the individuals in all their varied experience?
LIGHTHOUSE TRIPTYCH
For the full show, watch here.
Adaptation and choreography by Stephanie Jean Lane
Musical score by Mark Van Hare
Directed by Jamie Watkins
3 Act Dance-Theater, 60 min
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Presented in June, 2013 at The Brick with Kyle Gerry, and Mackenzie Jahnke, and Stephanie Jean Lane
Presented in January, 2013 at Dixon Place with Kyle Gerry, Stephanie Jean Lane, and Devon Werden
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Adapted from Virginia Woolf's "To The Lighthouse," Lighthouse Triptych follows the structure of the 1927 novel with three stylistically distinct parts: Part 1 a solo dance-monologue of the matriarch Mrs. Ramsay's carefully constructed dinner party; Part 2 a three-person dance presenting the chaos wrought upon a family through the passage of time; and Part 3 a naturalistic one-act depicting the return to the family's abandoned seaside home after decades away.
D/EVOLUTION OF THE SUPERHERO
Clockwise from L: Jin Ha, Leslie Fray, Stephanie Jean Lane, Michael Bradley Cohen
Concept by Stephanie Jean Lane
Created and performed by Michael Bradley Cohen, Leslie Fray, Jin Ha, and Stephanie Jean Lane
Presented June, 2014 in The Brick's Comic Book Theater Festival
1 Act Dance-Theater, 20 min
Four monologues, one big dance: At the core of every superhero lies their greatest fear, and all their powers are carefully crafted to prevent that fear from becoming reality.
Let's dance about it.
