June Carryl

Iowa City, Iowa-born playwright and actor June Carryl grew up in Denver, Colorado. Starting out in Political Science at Brown University, intending to be a lawyer, she bailed on the last round of LSAT's and pursued a Ph.D. in English Literature instead. She wrote a play for her midterm in a Drama survey course taught by playwright Paula Vogel (How I Learned To Drive, The Baltimore Waltz) who invited to join her playwriting class where she studied with two of the best writers to come out of that or any program, Pulitzer Prize Winner Nilo Cruz (Night Train to Bolina, Anna in the Tropics) and the late John C. Russell (Stupid Kids), as well as guest artists Aisha Rahman and Anna Deavere Smith. June's first play was a disaster, only one of two NOT to receive a production as part of the annual New Plays Festival. She went on to receive her MA in 1992, played Cassius in a well-received production of Julius Caesar with the Fish on Fire Theater Company, and wrote a second play, a full length about a traveling circus. Perfect Freaks was presented at the George Houston Bass Memorial Play-Rites Festival at Rites & Reason Theater in 1993. That same year, she co-wrote Don't Answer these Screams with Silence, with Kelly Smith and Kathleen Jenkins, to benefit the Rhode Island Coalition Against Domestic Violence for the 1993 International Women's Playwriting Festival at Perishable Theater. Carryl moved to the Bay Area in 1993 to study acting and worked professionally for seven years and taught playwriting and acting workshops for high school students. She joined Z-Space (later the Z Collective) and later the Marin Playwrights Lab and produced an adaptation of Wole Soyinka's Things Fall Apart and a one-act, The Art of Yes. During her time in the Bay Area, she appeared in shows at the Magic (Pieces of the Quilt), San Francisco Shakespeare Festival (As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream), Berkeley Repertory Theater (Macbeth, Civil Sex), and A.C.T. (Insurrection: Holding History). In 1999, she received the Dean Goodman Choice Award for Best actress in Thick Description's production of Suzan-Lori Parks's drama, Venus. She moved to Los Angeles around 2000 and adopted her mother's maiden name (Lomena) professionally. She was hired to write her first screenplay, The Will, a gothic horror film for Deak Ferrand (Hatch Pictures) and Ken Rosen. Her first film acting roles were in A Smile Like Yours (1997), What Dreams May Come (1998), Sweet November (2001), and Woman on Top (2000). In 2003, she was commissioned to write The Rings of Saturn for Visible Theater in New York, which was later performed for The Blank Theatre's Living Room Series (2004). This was followed by a staged reading of God's Wife at the Zephyr Theater. In 2005, she appeared in a production of The Threepenny Opera at the Odyssey Theater. In 2007, she wrote her second feature, The Pursuit of Happy, and began developing a new feature about the genocide in Zimbabwe in the 1980s. She is a member of the Actors Studio.