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After obtaining a BA in Zoology from the University of Vermont, Dawn received her Master of Fine Arts in Acting from the University of Pittsburgh. While at grad school, she spent her summers acting with the Three Rivers Shakespeare Festival, and co-founded their successful Young Company. To supplement her studies while completing her thesis, she spent over a year performing improv with TheaterSports, wrote and performed her own bilingual one-person show, and toured with Shakespeare in the Schools, an outreach program bringing Shakespeare to students K-12. She also co-founded and performed with the stage combat/commedia/movement theater group GREX.
After receiving her MFA, Dawn moved to Chicago, where she worked as a professional stage actress for over 15 years. She performed with a number of award-winning and critically acclaimed theatre companies, including The Goodman Theatre, Victory Gardens Theater (winner of the Tony Award for Best Outstanding Regional Theater), Lookingglass Theatre (whose most famous member is David Schwimmer), Eclipse Theatre, About Face Theatre, The Free Associates, and Chicago's premiere women's company, Footsteps Theatre, where she was a company member for five years. In 1997, Dawn spent a summer studying at the Royal National Theater in London, and the following summer performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland.
At Footsteps, Dawn became the first female theatrical Resident Fight Choreographer in the Midwest (and possibly the country). It was during her years at Footsteps that she founded her own theatre company, Babes With Blades, the first all-female stage combat theatre company in the country. Since 1997, BWB has been creating new works and producing shows that explore the martial aspects of women, and has won enormous critical and audience acclaim.
In mid-2007, Dawn stepped down from the Artistic Directorship of Babes With Blades and began planning her move to Los Angeles. She arrived on New Year's Day of 2009 and since then has found work in stage plays, student films, webisodes, feature films, and television. In keeping with her propensity to found things, in 2012 she founded her own production company, Vicarious Films. It produces films by and about women, for everyone, in accordance with its byline "Where Women Move the Action."
