Adria Tennor
Director, Writer, Actor
Adria Tennor earned her BFA in stage directing and acting from New York University and Playwrights Horizons Theater School. She began her career as an actress, and her first professional job was playing a twelve-year old boy looking at porn in Tompkins Square park in Hal Hartley’s Amateur, which premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. She works regularly in television and film and is most known for her recurring role on Mad Men as well as in the Academy Award-winning film, The Artist. Dissatisfied with the amount of work available to women, Tennor began writing her own material, performing stand-up early in her career. She then spun her material into a rave-reviewed one-woman show, StripSearch, about finding love and happiness with the help of a twelve-foot pole. Another monologue she wrote and performed, Pie in the Sky, was published in the anthology – Worst Laid Plans – alongside works by Whitney Cummings, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Allison Brie and Laraine Newman. Tennor made her directorial debut with a self-penned childhood drama, Cracked, starring Marguerite Moreau, which garnered awards and laurels around the country. Her second film, Pie, starring Jessica Paré, was a favorite on the festival circuit in 2018, also garnering awards and laurels internationally. Her feature script, Never Been Born, won her a CineStory Fellowship. Currently, she is teaching and coaching actors and non-actors both virtually and in-person in Los Angeles. Her ambition is to create and tell more stories for and about women and to foster opportunities for a diverse point of view in theater, film and television.
