Keira Keeley is an award-winning professional actress whose specialties include new works and premier play devlopment as well as revivals.
In highschool, Keeley’s focus went to athletics (track and field and basketball) , but she managed to participate in a few plays and musicals her Jumiornand Seniornyear when she left basketball.
Keeley attended Rollins College in Florida when her full focus became theater. Her non-performance contributions were mostly in the shop, where she learned how to read designs and construct sets as well as a dabble in welding. Alas, this skill did not transfer to the real world outside of theater as all her construction know-how was how to build and strike sets quickly, instead of any permanent construction. For either task, she proudly knows her way around tools.
At Rollins he talents were pulled to the Fred Stone Theater, a small avant-garde student run black box at the edge of campus. Here Keeley was fearless in plays like The Blue Room, The Shape of Things, and Proof. It was here,too, that her skills for new works began as an actress, a director, and a designer.
After Magna cum Laude graduation, she skipped further formal education and auditioned only for the Actors Theater of Louisville apprenticeshipnprogr@m and was accepted as one of eleven young ladies selected from the entire county. Here again she joyfully and aptly contributed to set construction, load ins and strikes, backcstage crew shaking trees to loom like storms and doing costume quick changes for A Christmas Carol and again, new works. Here, Keeley was cast in an Adam Bock original Three Guys and a Brenda in the Humana 10 Minute play festival. Thus began her professional devotion to new works.
Keeley immediately moved to NYC and began the soul-crushing perseverance of waiting all day, day after day, for a chance to fill a no-show slot for AEA general auditions. When she learned about auditions through Calleri Casting (a devoted agency who first connected during her ATL NYC showcase), directed by Annie Kaufman (a director she observed at ATL rehearsals for a new work she was a dresser for) by Adam Bock (the award winning Humana short), she hand wrote a letter—she had no internet, no laptop, no printer—suggesting herself for an audition and it worked! She was cast in The Thugs at Soho Rep which got extended and she agreed to join the AEA union.