Author Profile:  Dinah Lenney

Dinah Lenney received her BA from Yale and a Certificate of Acting from the Neighborhood Playhouse where she studied acting with Sanford Meisner.  She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars and her essays continue to appear in national journals, anthologies and newspapers.

Dinah's acted up and down both coasts and continues to work in theatre, film and television, having just begun her 13th season as Nurse Shirley on NBC's critically acclaimed ER, for which she was honored by the Screen Actors Guild as a member of the Best Ensemble of Actors in 1997.  She coaches privately and works as an adjunct professor for performing arts programs at UCLA, UCSD and Pepperdine Universtiy.

Dinah co-authored Acting for Young Actors with director Mary Lou Belli, and the University of Nebraska Press will publish her memoir, Bigger Than Life, as part of their continuing series, American Lives, in Spring, '07.

She lives in Los Angeles with her husband Fred and their children, Eliza and Jake.