larissa benfey
larissa benfey
The Actor
I began acting at the young age of seven. It started out as simple church productions and small parts in school plays, but quickly became a passion I chose to pursue. Over the past two decades, I've been in a wide variety of theatre productions, including The Vagina Monologues, Hurray for Johnny Canuck, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
While I'll always love theatre, I'm also no stranger to the screen. I started jumping in front of cameras not long after discovering the stage, determined to hone my craft there as well. Now, with more than twenty years of experience behind me, I still enjoy every opportunity to do what I love. Armed with determination, dedication, and positivity, I plan to take over the world--or at least see all of it--one film set or theatre stage at a time.
The Writer
From short stories to screenplays, I was writing well before I started my acting journey. Now a university graduate with a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in English, and a Bachelor of Education, I'm a teacher, poet, and a freelance copywriter, but my first love is writing fiction. Six years of studying the greats taught me what captivating poetry and prose look like, but it was the age-old experience of trial-and-error that taught me how to emulate it myself, and brought my writing to where it is today.
In 2022, I was diagnosed as autistic and it's been quite the journey since. I've been looking back on my life with a new lens and looking forward with more understanding. And I've found it remarkably helpful to explore this part of my life through poetry. I'd been working toward publishing a novel, but this giant revelation/development forced it onto the back burner while I did some soul searching through verse. And that collection of poems turned into my first book, Beneath My Skin, which you can explore for yourself here.