about me :)
Hi, my name is Gina! I am a queer actor based in Chicago and my hometown of the S.F Bay Area.
I’m from San Jose, California, and I grew up taking classes and performing at California Theatre Center, which shut its doors in 2017. I took my arts education into my own hands to seek out performance opportunities in the midst of Silicon Valley, including interning with the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, performing in the annual A Christmas Carol at Northside Theatre in San Jose, and joining the troupe of Upstage Theatre to complete The Complete Works of Shakespeare (abridged) at the Mountain View Center for Performing Arts.
Fast forward a bit, and I am now in my final semester at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign pursuing a B.F.A in Acting and Minor in Psychology, expected to graduate in May 2025!
Photo: Collin Quinn Rice Makeup: Syd Genco
This semester, I am training to pass the Society of American Fight Directors (SAFD) Unarmed Skills Test in February, Winter’s Tale performances in April, voiceover and on-camera work, continued dialect work, and the Class of 2025 showcase in April.
I’m so excited for this busy final semester, and I’m equally excited and terrified for whatever is waiting beyond graduation!
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In 2019, I had the chance to see Ms. Blakk for President at Steppenwolf, by Tarell Alvin McCraney and Tina Landau, and immediately knew that Chicago was the place to be. Queer visibility is expanding, and continuing to tell the stories of our past, present, and future, will protect the LGBTQ+ community and its most vulnerable members.
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If I could save one acting book/ memoir from my house on fire, it would be this one: Drama: An Actor’s Education, by John Lithgow. His honesty about his life as an actor and a person is so compelling, and it’s worth rereading every six months to revisit nuggets of wisdom that may have been missed from the previous 20 times you’ve read this book.
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In addition to performance art, I love working on visual art as well! This piece, “Climate Change Giraffe,” is from a series of postcards I made that feature different animals in varying states of concern for political and environmental collapse, each with a simple design and a colorful background.
