Michele Tannen (she/her)
Actor/Writer
I am an actress and solo-show writer from Los Angeles California. My experience includes 25 years on Los Angeles stages, including leading and supporting roles at the Stella Adler Theater Hollywood, Two Roads Theater, and The Secret Rose. I am an active member of Towne Street Theatre, Los Angeles’ premier African American Theatre Company, and The Decameron Project. In November 2024, I traveled with Decameron to Tokyo Japan, where I performed in 10 plays in their audience favorite The One-Minute Play Festival along with performers from Japan and the United States. That festival also ran at the Whitefire in August of 2025. In 2023, I won the Best Actress Award from the New York Equity Library Festival for playing Abby in Felix Racelis’ My Shayna Punim. I have also appeared in numerous films, television shows and commercials.
I wrote my solo show, Surviving Mother’s Day, in Emmy-award winner Matt Hoverman’s Go Solo writers’ workshop because stories of children of mentally ill parents are far rarer than those about parents of mentally ill children. Yet the NIH says that 2.7 million parents (3.8%) had a serious mental illness in 2017. Surviving Mother’s Day aims to bring the children of those parents out of the darkness so that they know they are not alone. The show also tells of a Jewish family that narrowly escaped the Holocaust by leaving 1930s Germany just before the US stopped accepting Jewish immigrants – a critical remembrance, as today’s leaders seem to have forgotten our nation’s role as a refuge for those under threat.
