Lucy River

Managing Director and Instructor

Lucy grew up in Ireland. She got her first professional short film role when she was eleven years old and appeared on national television (RTE) shows regularly as a teen performer and presenter, and in various ads after that. Age 13, she played Annie, in Annie the Musical, a professional production at the University of Limerick Concert Hall, and sang solo with the National RTE Concert Orchestra on stage the following year. Aged 16, she won Best Young Actress in the finals of the National All-Ireland Drama Festival for her portrayal as Tillie in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man in the Moon Marigolds. She was represented by TN Enterprises in Ireland, at age 14, and later, by Applause (in New Mexico). 

Before leaving Ireland for the US in the mid-2000’s, she toured with a Dublin-based theater group, BDNC Productions, in an improvised movement theater piece called Hyde and Jekyll, which they performed in the dungeons of Dublin Castle during the Dublin Fringe Festival, and again in Prague Theater Festival a year later. She later appeared as Maire in another BDNC production at the Pavilion in Dun Laoghaire. Lucy earned a Diploma in Speech and Drama Studies from the DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama, Dublin, and was admitted into the Bachelor in Acting program at the Samuel Beckett Center at Trinity College Dublin. She was graded top of her class at both conservatories. During her final year at DIT, she played Lucy Lockett in A Beggar’s Opera. During her first year at TCD she played Majella, a recurring role, in Pure Mule, a TV series set in the middle of Ireland, which was televised by RTE.

Lucy is heavily influenced by the work of voice teacher, Roy Hart, and his student, Kevin Crawford, with whom she studied in the South of France and after which time she wrote her thesis on Hart, Carl Jung, and the connection between acting, voice, breath, and spirituality. Lucy was a member of Limerick Youth Theater as an older teen and has fond memories of playing Grusha in Caucasion Chalk Circle. Lucy went on to teach acting classes and direct productions at Limerick Youth Theater and Listowel Youth Theater, and also guest-taught for several adult drama groups around Ireland. She won a local government award for her direction of Aesop’s Fables (St. Mary’s Cathedral, Limerick) with Tipperary North Youth Theater. After she emigrated to the U.S. in the mid-2000’s she performed as Rosalind in As You Like it (2015), featured as Hazel Shaw, an Irish school teacher, in Black Blizzard: a History Channel documentary, appeared in several shorts, some commercials, and she also taught a series of acting for television workshops in Santa Fe before taking a break to raise a child. For Lucy, discovering Santa Fe Improv and long-form comedy improv felt like finding a long-lost twin she never knew existed. Lucy is formerly the Director of Leadership Santa Fe, President of the Board of the First Judicial District Bar Association and of Santa Fe Improv.