We’d like to welcome: Suzi Steffen

As part of our efforts to solidify the beginnings made last year in the dawn of 2amTheatre.com, we will be rolling out some programmatic additions. Let’s start with: award winning arts maven Suzi Steffen. Suzi will be joining 2amTheatre.com as a contributor, kicking off her stay with us with wall-to-wall coverage of the Fertile Ground festival in Portland, Oregon.

Formerly performing and visual arts editor of the Eugene Weekly and currently a freelancer for the Oregonian, Stage Directions Magazine, TheatreFace, AlterNet and others. Suzi’s setting up her own statewide arts journalism website in Oregon to cover not only the usual suspects — Portland and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival — but food, wine, theater, dance, visual arts, literary arts and film across the state. When she takes a break from Facebook (where you can friend her) and Twitter (where you can follow her), she’s going to launch the site and promises to bug everyone in the #2amt community to comment on posts.

Suzi’s both a critic and a general arts writer. She always wants to learn more about theater, including back and front of house details, acting and directing philosophies and pre-production esoteric rituals.
Suzi grew up in Kansas City attending the Missouri Repertory Theatre (now the KC Rep), the Unicorn Theatre, Quality Hill Playhouse and many others. At the University of Missouri, she found that her class clown routine did not translate well into actual acting, though she did get to play a sad lady-in-waiting in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. She majored in history and art history and then earned master’s degrees in art history and literary nonfiction. Suzi moved to Oregon in 2002 in pursuit of the state’s natural beauty … and to get away from Iowa’s hog lots, blizzards and exploding cows.

She’s a pescatarian, news junkie, culture vulture, and an adjunct professor at the University of Oregon, where in winter quarter she’s teaching both reporting and a class called Writing About the Arts.