ARTIST BIO

Madeline Sayet is a recipient of The White House Champion of Change Award for Native America for her work as a director, writer, performer, and educator. She is currently the Resident Artistic Director at Amerinda Inc. and the Artistic Director of The Mad & Merry Theatre Company.

Madeline grew up in Connecticut where she learned storytelling at an early age from her mother Mohegan Medicine Woman Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel and her great-aunt, the late Mohegan Medicine Woman Gladys Tantaquidgeon. She began performing in school plays as a young child. Her love of theatre, oral tradition, and timeless stories carried over into an early appreciation of Shakespeare, which she began performing locally when she was 14. Starting in high school, she also spent four years as part of the resident company at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Puppetry Conference.

Madeline went on to study acting under the Atlantic Theater Company at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where she received her BFA in Theater. In order to further develop her ability to articulate the need for Native Theatre in America she returned to NYU for graduate study, where she earned her MA in Arts Politics and Post-Colonial Theory from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where she received the Leo Bronstein Homage Award. She also trained in improv and sketch comedy at The Upright Citizens Brigade.

During her graduate studies, she co-founded and became artistic director of The Mad & Merry Theatre Company, whose mission is "to empower underrepresented voices through fresh perspectives on traditional stories." Mad & Merry's first production was a Mohegan version of The Tempest, which has since toured to The Sylvester Manor in Shelter Island, NY. Other directing work includes: Daughters of Leda (Dixon Place, Women Center Stage Festival at The Culture Project), Wendy Wasserstein's Uncommon Women and Others (The Connelly Theater), Mad & Merry Shorts (Gene Frankel), Expecting Lila & Shades of Blue (Drama Bookshop Theatre), Sister Twins (Kraine Theater), etc. Upcoming directing work: Miss Lead (Amerinda/59e59 Theaters), The Powwow Highway (Amerinda), Cymbelline (Mad & Merry Theatre). Recent performance credits include: Jane/Lelewayou in readings of Manahatta by Mary Kathryn Nagle (The Public Theater, United Nations), Bright Eyes in Waaxe's Law by Mary Kathryn Nagle (Newseum), The Mirage Theatre Company's Cedars, etc. Some of her many Shakespeare performance credits include: Twelfth Night (Viola), The Tempest (Stephano), Measure for Measure (Lucio), The Comedy of Errors (Dromio), The Taming of the Shrew (Katharina), Romeo and Juliet (Juliet), Winter's Tale (Perdita), etc. Her writing is featured in the upcoming anthology "Dawnland Voices: Writing from Indigenous New England" from University of Nebraska Press. She has lectured on representations of indigenous women on stage, the importance of language, and The Tempest frequently at NYU, and most recently at UMASS:Boston.

Madeline currently works in New York City and the surrounding region as a freelance director, performer and teacher.

Website:

www.madelinesayet.com