Susan S. McGinnis

Originally from Chagrin Falls, Ohio, Susan has worked professionally as an actress and singer around the country and abroad in theatre, television, and film. Additionally, McGinnis is a writer, director, producer, and teacher. She has taught acting to children from pre-school through high school in both academic and extracurricular settings. As a private acting coach, she works with actors of all ages.

For close to two decades, Susan mentored and created original theatre with young people in NYC’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood with The 52nd Street Project. The organization’s mission is to increase literacy and self-esteem in its largely first- generation immigrant population through plays and playwriting.

Susan was the lead singer for the band Les Autres, and continues to appear as a guest singer for a variety of bands.

Having written and produced original works with several New York-based theatre companies including Roman Armadillo and And Coco’s the Maid productions, McGinnis became Founding Artistic Director of Seaside Shakespeare, a non-profit theatre company she created, who performed the works of William Shakespeare and other inspiring artists in the bars, beaches, churches, and schools of Nantucket, MA. The company created an invention on the works of Shakespeare with original music entitled “The Wit and Wisdom of Will’s Women.”

Together with her colleague composer Kim D. Sherman, McGinnis is developing a work linking scenes from multiple Shakespeare plays in a contemporary setting to create a narrative. The cast calls for one man and five women—creating a greater number of opportunities for the latter than most of Shakespeare’s plays as originally written.

McGinnis appears seasonally on Nantucket Island as the mystical, mythical Lady Grey in the Sally Horchow/Cecilia Johnson-produced “Nantucket! The MusACKal.”

Currently in Ohio and most recently transplanted from Los Angeles, McGinnis divides her time between those two, NYC, Nantucket, and wherever her work takes her. She is currently writing her one-woman show, Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered: Tales of a Reluctant Waitress.

A proud member of AEA and SAG/AFTRA, Susan holds a BA in Theatre from St. Mary’s College at the University of Notre Dame.