Carolyn Best is a Brooklyn-based actor, dramaturg, director, tap dancer, and 2024 graduate of Ithaca College with a BFA in Acting from Vienna, Virginia.
She has worked professionally at The Cherry Arts (As You Like It), Ithaca Shakespeare Company (The Two Gentlemen of Verona), and Amoeba Productions (As You Like It).
In addition to mainstage performance work in Sweat, Julius Caesar, and red bike, she used her time at Ithaca College to proactively create her own work. She independently produced, directed, and dramaturged Heroes of the Fourth Turning at The Cherry Arts, and developed Mumsy, Get My Pan! and The Orange: An Odyssey as part of the pioneer MTD Collaboratory devising class. She also proudly served as president of Wheels for Women, fundraising for survivors of Domestic Violence in Kerala, India, and had the thrilling opportunity to read twice for the New Voices Literary Festival in The Virtuous Fall of the Girls from Our Lady of Sorrows and I'm Gonna Marry You Tobey Maguire.
In New York City, she is currently getting her imaginative sweat on developing The Practice Garage with TEAM member Libby King, and once a month, she reads plays about alienation and reconciliation with Sea Dog Theater.
Her north star is working toward a collage-like body of work full of question-forward, somatic art. She is suspect of anything didactic, and interested in anything that changes the rate of breath in the room. She believes in littleness, hard work, the sounds of words, surprises, rhythm, distortion, and all things tactile & particular. She is doing her best.
Growing up in Virginia, she inherited a love for knitting and Scrabble from her government bureaucrat parents. She did not inherit her red hair from the bureaucrats: that's a hand-me-down from her grandmother. She cares seriously about road trips, the word 'palimpsest', and always sneaking bites of leftover cookie dough: first shaving heaping spoonfuls with wild abandon, then frugally scraping concentric circles around and around the bowl.
A Few Favorites
a la Letterboxd Top 4
movies
books
