Deirdre was born in Queens, NY, where after-school activities included putting on plays in backyards, ballet classes, digging up worms for the fisherman neighbor and exploring vacant houses waiting to be demolished in the wave of gentrification. When her parents traded in semi-urban life for the picket fences of suburbia, she found diversion in the drama club, performing in school plays (Best Actress In the Play Festival!) and writing her own one-acts. With illusions of being too cool for school, she graduated early and toured Long Island schools with the Performing Arts Foundation, and acted in their productions at the esteemed PAF Playhouse in Huntington, LI.
After majoring in drama for a year in college, she concluded that the vast resources of a university were better suited to more intellectual pursuits and that drama was better learned on the boards in NYC. So she took off for LA. (Go figure.) Her penchant for wanderlust might these days be diagnosed as ADD, but in reality, she just didn't know what she wanted-- yet. But young, beautiful, and deep into punk AND disco music, she taught Hustle, Latin and Ballroom dancing by day and was a rock club denizen at night. Many, many adventures ensued--including the night she danced with Gene Kelly in his kitchen--and others that will never be uttered ever again.
This wanderlust life continued for a few years until a visit back to NY sparked an interest in returning to college for a true Liberal Arts education. Go big or go home, she thought. So she attended the University Of Pennsylvania, earning a BA in History, then returned to NYC. (Still not ADD). After living the starving artist life for awhile and not quite suited to it, she lamented to her friend Melvin Van Peebles, who gave her a book he wrote on options trading, inspiring her to try her hand at it. (She had written a paper on his artistic contributions in college and befriended him upon returning to the city.)
Back then, it was hard for a woman to forge her chosen path in Finance and Banking, particularly in something as esoteric as options, so she had to settle for less creative areas in the field. Such hamstringing was one of many factors that were to fuel her growing feminist sensibilities. (Alas, this was when Feminism was a dirty word.) So after trading her creative soul for a decent full-time paycheck, she lost it to the gods of Wall Street for a few years. Yet, she still found time to occasionally take some classes, perform onstage, find a stinker on the banks on the Gowanus as Billy Baldwin's detective partner in a film, and pull rank with a soap actor's character as a dayplayer on TV.
That is, until one night, a dream involving a camel, a desert, an ocean and a busload of tourists was later deftly analyzed by a dream interpreter as a sign to return full-time to her artistic roots—and she never looked back. She fell into writing, this time screen & tele-plays, placing or winning in numerous competitions, including Sundance, Final Draft, Scriptapalooza, and Austin Filmfest, (for which she was also a reader).
Her feminist sensibilities already awakened, she also co-produced a film on gender disparity in Hollywood, managing to convince a bunch of incredible people--Meryl Streep, Shonda Rhimes, Cate Blanchett, Reese Witherspoon, Traci Ellis Ross, Mary Louis Parker, Jessica Chastain, and more--to be in the film. And to talk about their own horror stories with sexism in the biz, and to offer their solutions for change. She was so successful with procuring talent that the director and producer called her "The Closer". The film is "This Changes Everything".
More aware than ever of her diverse strengths but realizing she missed performing too much to ignore the pull, she returned to school, this time at the 2-year conservatory program in Meisner training at William Esper Studios, where she experienced the most exhilarating and self-reflective time of her life. It's where she learned that performing is really her bag. That this is the journey on which she’s realized she’s most fulfilled. And that ADD stands for, "And…Deirdre’s Determined".
