ACTOR
SAG & AEA
LOS ANGELES, CA*
Biography
Work
Representation
Annex
Stefanée (she/her) is originally from Washington, D.C., and grew up just outside the city in a Maryland suburb. As a kid, she dreamed of becoming a children’s book author and illustrator, so much of her free time was spent drawing, reading, and writing. When she wasn’t doing that, she was often surrounded by the joyful chaos of her large extended family or involved in activities with her church community.
By high school, Stef was craving more than what her local school seemed to offer. She applied to a performing arts high school as a theatre major and auditioned with a monologue from for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake Shange. She got in—and that’s where her journey as a young actor really began. Around the same time, she also joined the youth conservatory at Studio Theatre in D.C., taking weekend and summer classes. Eventually, she was invited to audition for a role in their upcoming season—and was cast as GIRL in Breath, Boom by Kia Corthron.
She went on to study theatre at Temple University in Philadelphia. While she valued her theatre training, Stef was drawn to the broader liberal arts experience—volunteering in an urban garden through a sustainability course, discovering beat poetry in an American dissent class, and spending time at the Tyler School of Art. By junior year, she stepped away from Temple to train at Headlong Performance Institute, a program focused on movement and devised theatre.
With encouragement from one of her professors, Stef applied to three grad schools—and landed in San Francisco at the American Conservatory Theater. Her first time living on the West Coast was exhilarating, exhausting, and full of inspiration. That inspiration poured into her third-year thesis project, Willy Loman’s Mistress, a nod to Arthur Miller’s classic, Death of a Salesman. She transformed the performance space into a soft-lit fort made of muslin tapestries, creating an intimate world for a small audience. Drawing from her Headlong training, Stef devised a piece that included a scene between Nina and Konstantin—performed three different ways: with Barbie dolls, as a Commedia dell’arte character she’d developed earlier that year, and as herself, on the cusp of entering the professional world.
And enter it she did. Stef booked her first television role just before graduating and moved to New York City to film Baz Luhrmann’s vibrant, 70s-set hip-hop/disco series The Get Down. Since then, she’s continued working in TV and film.
Outside of performance, Stef enjoys building personal projects in writing and graphic design—most notably her ongoing archival project, the Black American Actress Database.