Susan Dolan Stevens

Susan Dolan Stevens is an actor and director who was born in Sterling Heights, Michigan, and raised on a dairy farm. She got her start in school drama and forensics competitions, attended Eastern Michigan University on a scholarship, where she most enjoyed performing in Richard III, and later transferred to Albion College to join a Great Lakes College Association program in New York. There she studied acting at the Lee Strasberg Institute with teachers including Lee Strasberg, Elaine Aiken and Geoffrey Horne, and took on stage management for a playwrights lab at the Actors Studio under Harold Clurman. She earned a directing MFA at the University of Utah, studying Shakespeare with David E. Jones and taking voice lessons from Charlene Bletson, and signed with the Burton & Perkins agency during her final year of graduate school. Commercials for McDonald's, Ford and Toyota were among her first screen jobs.