Amee Vyas
Amee Vyas
Amee Vyas
Amee Vyas has been a fixture of Atlanta theater for 18 years, and a mainstay of Atlanta’s only year-round Shakespeare repertory ensemble, the Atlanta Shakespeare Company (ASC), for 16 years. While at ASC, she earned her Actors Equity card playing Viola in Twelfth Night; becoming the area’s first, and for a time only, Asian-Indian actress to join the professional union. When ASC produced the Southeast’s premier of Shakespeare’s Two Noble Kinsmen, Ms. Vyas’ portrayal of the Jailor’s Daughter received national review in the Shakespeare Bulletin as one of “both strength and charm.”
Continuing a list of firsts, she co-founded South by Southeast, the only arts festival in the southeast to feature work by and of American artists of Asian-descent. The festival, like Ms. Vyas’ work on-stage, exemplifies her personal mission to defy traditional casting and produce stories that transcend color and gender.
Ms. Vyas credits her ability to think past superficial limitations and to get to the heart of the story to her English Literature studies at NYU. There she learned to see stories from multiple perspectives in class and in the neighborhoods of New York City. “If I hadn’t left home to go away to school, and to the draw of the city,” she cites, “I would never have had the courage to try storytelling as a life choice. First generation Indians weren’t exactly encouraged to go into the arts!” This drive to tell stories was first given outlet as a book reviewer (you can still find her reviews online) and eventually, as she became
more familiar with the theater community, as an adapter of rarely-produced classics. Her co-direction of Lysistrata was noted as a “must-see” by Creative Loafing and her co-direction of Double Falsehood was another ASC regional premier, which sold record numbers for an unknown Shakespeare play in its season.
Today, Ms. Vyas is expanding her storytelling to include helping others to tell their best stories; for five years, she has been a private dialect coach and has been a text coach for new Apprentice actors with ASC. In her free time, she makes a delicious martini as a part-time bartender and bar program consultant.