Jenn Colella

Jenn Colella is an American actress and singer.

She began her career as a comedian and then branched out into musical theater.

At Trustus, starting in the fall of 1995 and running through the spring of 1999, she played Kitty in Taking Steps, The Angel in Angels in America (both parts), the title role in Sylvia (twice), Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice, Amy in Company, Marta in Kiss of the Spider Woman, Teenage Greek Chorus in How I Learned to Drive, and Vivian in Free Will and Wanton Lust.

She graduated in 1996 with a dual degree in speech and drama.

Her family had moved to Hilton Head Island and had a golf store there.

While working at the shop one summer during college, she taught herself to juggle.

She stayed in the area for three years and worked at an insurance company call center.

In April 1997, she attended a Comet Carnival in Aiken, SC to observe Comet Hale–Bopp through a telescope.

From 1997 to 1999 she was a member of The Sol Divers (initially The Gib Cats) rock 'n' roll band.

Colella served as a company member of the Trustus Theatre beginning in her senior year.

In 2000 and 2001, she did summer stock at the Santa Rosa Summer Repertory Theatre, playing Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, Peter in Peter Pan, and Val in A Chorus Line.

As a UCI graduate, Colella participated in a showcase in New York, along with NYU and Yale, and auditioned for a part.

After going back to California for a few months, she got a call to come back to New York to audition for Sissy in the original production of Urban Cowboy, and was cast in her Broadway debut role.

From 2001 to 2019, there were four Peter Pans.

Additionally, she has been cast multiple times at the New York Musical Theatre Festival.

Colella went on to attend the University of California, Irvine, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts in Acting in 2002.

While at UCI, she played Miss Jane in Floyd Collins, Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland, Princess Ninetta in The Love of Three Oranges, and Victoria Grant in Victor/Victoria at the Barclay Theatre.

In her New York debut in Urban Cowboy, she earned a 2003 Outer Critics Circle Award nomination.

More recently, she landed a Tony Award nomination, and won the Drama Desk Award, Outer Critics Circle Award, and three regional theater awards for her portrayal of Annette/Beverley Bass in Come from Away.

On television, she has made over a dozen appearances, starting in 2003 on the game show Can You Tell? through An Evening with Lerner and Loewe, the initial Broadway in Concert Series installment on PBS in 2022.

Her film credits include the live capture of Come from Away's Broadway production.

Colella was born to Lindy Crawford and Mick Colella, and grew up in Summerville, South Carolina Starting at eight, she sang in church and school concert and show choirs, which were where she learned to Harmonize.

In church, she also played handbells.

She refers to herself as a choir nerd.

Her mother has said of the eight year old, singing as an auctioneer in a school play, "She took the microphone in her hand, looked right at the audience, and this voice came out."

People wondered where all the sound came from.

A local woman gave theatre lessons in her garage, and to earn money to take the classes, Colella did odd jobs about the woman's house, including painting the exterior.

Her first role was Gertie in Oklahoma!.

In seventh grade, she had a hunter education class, which she says helped make it comfortable to handle guns when she performed in Annie Get Your Gun.

When, as part of a school group, she saw Phantom of the Opera in New York, she decided that she was going to be on stage.

While an undergraduate at Columbia College, she played basketball, tennis and flag football.

During her senior year, she quarterbacked.

Further Off-Broadway work included the title character in the Beebo Brinker Chronicles (2008), Closer Than Ever (2012), and a staged reading of Twelve Angry Men (2018) with an all-female cast.

In 2008 Colella performed in abridged versions of Girl Crazy and Side Show, two of the parts of Broadway: Three Generations at the Kennedy Center.

The production celebrated the reopening of the renovated Eisenhower Theater.

She also appeared in The Full Monty (2009) for the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey, which included Elaine Stritch as Jeanette, and the American premiere of Take Flight (2010), her first pilot role, for the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey.

She has performed in over a half-dozen world premieres from Wisconsin to Florida and Massachusetts to California, including three at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego.

Along with Come from Away in 2017, she has been cast in the original Broadway productions of Urban Cowboy, High Fidelity (2006), Chaplin: The Musical (2012), and If/Then (2014), and Off-Broadway original productions of Slut (2005) and Lucky Guy (2011).

She received a Grammy Award in January 2018 for her role for the Dear Evan Hansen original cast album.

See: Awards and nominations