Dinah grew up on the East Coast, outside Boston and New York City, and graduated from high school in Pelham, a small town just north of Manhattan. She earned her Bachelors at Yale and a Certificate of Acting from the Neighborhood Playhouse School, eventually moving to Los Angeles where, among other roles, she landed the long-recurring part of Nurse Shirley on TV’s critically acclaimed series, ER. Continuing to work on stage and in television, Dinah’s played a wide range of roles in theatre and musical theatre, and has guest-starred on series too many to mention, among them Murphy Brown, Law and Order, Monk, and The Sarah Connor Chronicles. She’s taught in acting programs out of Universities all over the country, and is the co-author, with Mary Lou Belli, of Acting for Young Actors (Random House). Her memoir, Bigger than Life was published in the American Lives Series at the University of Nebraska Press, and excerpted for the “Lives” column in The New York Times Sunday Magazine. Dinah serves as core faculty for the Bennington Writing Seminars, where she took an MFA in Creative Nonfiction. She’s a core member of the faculty for the Rainier Writing Workshop as well, and a full-time lecturer in the Master of Professional Writing program at the University of Southern California. Dinah’s essays have appeared in various literary journals as well as in the Los Angeles Times, where she reviews with some regularity for the book pages. She lives in Echo Park, just over the hill from Dodger Stadium, with her husband and children, Fred, Eliza, and Jake, and their benignly obstreperous dogs.
Theatrical Resume
