About
Kersti Bryan is an actress, writer, director and producer born and raised in Golden, Colorado and is based in New York City. After graduating from Carnegie Mellon’s School of Drama in Acting, Ms. Bryan began her professional acting career as a company member at Oregon Shakespeare under the artistic direction of Bill Rauch. From there she was launched into NYC and has worked internationally, in NYC and regionally in Film, Television and Theatre. Most recently Kersti co-wrote, directed and produced her first short film Egg Party, a whimsical tale about infertility, which will premiere on the festival circuit in Fall of 2020. As a performer Kersti was most recently seen in numerous television shows and films including, Hustlers, Ray Donovan, FBI: Most Wanted, New Amsterdam, and All Rise and on stage starring in two national tours of Martin Luther On Trial. In 2010, Ms. Bryan received a Theatre Communications Group Travel Grant to collaborate with Russian artists on a production of Woody Allen’s Riverside Drive in Moscow. Working alongside the new generation of Russian artists experiencing globalization, Ms. Bryan’s curiosity deepened around the work of Russian artists bridging restrictive and oppressive policies to more emerging global rhetoric and the inherent inter-generational divide. In response to this experience, Ms. Bryan launched Violet’s Umbrella Productions, as an investigatory home for cross-cultural collaboration and theatrical experiments. In 2015 Violet’s Umbrella Productions partnered with TheatreLab in NYC for a critically acclaimed, sold-out 5-week run of Asa Merritt’s one-woman show, True Believer, directed by Joshua K. Brody and starring Ms. Bryan. Inspired by events in Egypt during the Arab Spring, explores how a young American idealistic journalist grows increasingly more radicalized. In preparation for the workshop, Ms. Bryan traveled to Palestine, Jordan and Israel in the spring of 2014. Ms. Bryan was selected as part of the Theatre Communications Group Delegation of Theatre Professionals to Havana, Cuba in October 2015. She has been a teaching artist at Oregon Shakespeare and a guest artist at Interlochen Arts Academy.
She is the co-founder of The Clear Day Project, a living theater project geared towards groups most affected by the COVID-19 Pandemic.