Lila Newman is all about telling stories.
The Short Story:
She is a New York actor/writer with (too) many artistic impulses.
Lila's general artistic pursuits explore: the medium of radio, the interplay of comedy and tragedy, magical realism, text mash-ups, Shakespeare, technology and mediation, the relationship of actor to audience, beauty, absurdity, beautiful absurdity, absurd beauty, beautiful beauty, absurd absurdity and being needlessly reflexive.
The Long Story:
Lila Newman is an actor, writer, musician and comedian. Sometimes she does all of that at the same time. Lila is also a graduate of the University of Chicago and received her MFA in Acting from Drama Centre London with study at the Vakhtangov Institute in Moscow. She currently studies acting with Deborah Hedwall.
Selected screen work: Lila can be seen on Amazon's Alpha House, opposite John Goodman and Julie White, written by Garry Trudeau. She has also twice appeared on A Prairie Home Companion (NPR) a as guest star with the Royal Academy of Radio Actors. Stage work includes New York: How to be an American (reading), White on White (Steps Theatre), About Face (The Brick), A Map to Somewhere Else, Something Wicked (Everyday Inferno). Chicago: The Ballad of Lula Del Ray (Manual Cinema), Sketch Comedy & Improv (Donny’s Skybox at The Second City, iO (Improv Olympic), The Playground), Spectacle Performer (Redmoon), Compass Players (Pocket Guide to Hell), Liberal Arts: The Musical, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Underscore Theater Company) Williamstown Theater Festival: 356/365 Plays, Uncle Sam I Am (Nikos Theater). London: Hedda Gabler, The Broken Heart (The Platform Theatre), Twelfth Night (Studio Theatre at Kings Cross) Moscow: The Seagull (SADA Theatre).
Lila writes sketch comedy for Live from Here with Chris Thile on American Public Media. From 2013-2017 she wrote for Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion. Current writing collaborations also include writing and voicing for Radiotopia's The Truth podcast and developing a new stagework on the folk tradition of murder ballads with the Everyday Inferno Theatre company (where she is also an Aristic Associate).
Lila is also developing a play about Ora Nichols, the pioneer of Golden Age Radio Sound Effects which was awarded a grant from the Edes Foundation and the University of Chicago. She was recently a quarter finalist in the ScreenCraft Short Screenplay Contest.
Lila is a comedy nerd. A graduate of Chicago's Second City & iO Conservatories and a member of Chicago’s Playground Theater, she's performed sketch and long-form in venues all around the Windy City including: Donny's Skybox and the DeMaat at The Second City, iO, The Playground, a handful of dive bars and countless dilapidated storefronts. She performed under many group names, all of them sound like parodies of comedy group names, among them: The Business and Lumberjack Tsunami (Check out reviews in Time Out and on WBEZ). She performs sketch and improv in NYC at The PIT and UCB.
She is a classically trained soprano with a passion for belt, folk and jazz. Lila plays an ok piano, a better ukulele and the clawhammer banjo. Lila’s voiceover work includes: national segments for A Prairie Home Companion, The Truth Podcast on Radiotopia, Verizon, Stop n' Shop, J.C. Penny, Clairol's new Nice n' Easy campaign and multiple Summer’s Eve spots both US & international markets.
@lilanewman - Twitter/Instagram:
