Seana McKenna

Primarily a stage actor, Seana McKenna has had only a few roles in television or film. Raised in the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke and later in nearby Port Credit, McKenna spent just one year at the University of Toronto before moving to Montréal to attend the National Theatre School, graduating in 1979. She made her professional acting debut the same year at the Blyth Festival appearing in This Foreign Land, Chila by James Nichol and The Death of the Donnellys. She spent a second season at Blyth in 1980 and made her Toronto debut in The Mac Paps at Toronto Workshop Productions also in 1980. In 1981 she appeared in the Toronto Free Theatre production of Bertolt Brecht`s In the Jungle of Cities. Her long and distinguished association with the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario began in 1982 when she joined the Shakespeare 3 Company, as the festival’s Young Company was then called, appearing as Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and as Diana in All’s Well That Ends Well. Her breakthrough performance came two years later when she played Juliet, opposite Colm Feore’s Romeo in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. She has played more than 20 of Shakespeare`s famous heroines at Stratford over the years and will play Constance in Shakespeare’s King John at the 2014 Stratford Festival. McKenna won a Dora Mavor Moore Award for her performance in the title role of Shaw’s Saint Joan in 1991 and a second in 1998 for outstanding direction of Fugard’s Valley Song. Her third Dora, in 2007, was for her performance as Lady Torrance in Orpheus Descending. She received a Jessie Award for Wit and a Genie Award for The Hanging Garden, which was directed by Thom Fitzgerald. In 2010, McKenna was given an honorary master of fine arts degree from the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.