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Sara Bickweat Penner

she/her/hers

  • Senior Lecturer

202A Todd Union
(585) 274-0596
sbickwea@ur.rochester.edu


Biography

Sara Bickweat Penner is an actor, director, and Voice and Movement specialist who has spent many years working in theatre in New York City, Chicago, and regionally throughout the U.S. She has her MFA from The Actors Studio in New York and has worked with Arthur Penn, Lloyd Richards, Robert Lupone, Christopher Shinn, Paul Rudd and Elizabeth Kemp and many others. She has taught Voice and Speech to actors as well as business professionals in educational and professional settings. She has done numerous independent and industrial films and worked as the student/talent liaison on Bravo's Inside the Actors Studio.  In Chicago, Sara co-founded Candentia Theatre Company which focused on the production of new and devised work. She has performed and produced in the NY, Berkshire, Minneapolis, and Rochester Fringe Festivals and loves the creation of new work or the reimagining of established plays in a new way. Locally Sara continues to work as an actor, director and dialect coach (Blackfriars Theatre, JCC CenterStage, Hummingbird Theatre Co., Geva’s Feilding Stage, DEEP Arts, TYKEs).  Sara has taught on the Acting faculty at the New York Film Academy, where she helped create their Voice and Movement Curriculum, the Music Theatre Company in Chicago, and as an early learning through the arts educator in public and private schools throughout NYC and Rochester. Prior to her full-time appointment at the University of Rocherster, Sara was an Adjunct Lecturer of Voice and Movement at the University of Rochester and a Lecturer of Acting and Voice and Diction at FLCC.  Sara also teaches at Geva Summer Academy and Writers and Books.