Biography
As an aspiring doctor and the only child of an investment banker and a flight attendant, Rena grew up between New York's Upper West Side and Westchester. She enjoyed ballet and jazz dance, horseback riding, skiing, and tennis, and by high school was a scholar athlete who played Varsity tennis, basketball, soccer, and lacrosse, with a brief career as a sprinter in college. With a wide range of interests and talents, she can truly be considered a modern-day Renaissance woman. After playing the lead in her sixth grade play she was incurably bit by the acting bug and by the time she finished college she couldn't fight it any longer.
At 18, she was accepted into a prestigious eight-year medical program at Brown University into which fewer than 150 aspiring doctors are accepted each year. At Brown, Rena majored in Afro-American Studies, was selected as the freshman speaker for Black History Month, spent one semester teaching in New York and another studying at the Sorbonne in Paris. Her extracurricular activities included peer counseling, volunteer court advocate for domestic abuse, writing opinion pieces for the Brown newspaper, and performing original poetry.
Upon graduating, Rena decided to defer her medical school career to pursue her love of modeling. After booking several jobs for clients like Panasonic and Essence Magazine, a series of fortunate events led her to the Neighborhood Playhouse to study acting under Richard Pinter.
After completing two years at the Playhouse with Mr. Pinter, Rena decided not to return to medical school in order to pursue acting full-time. Her first real on-set experience was on One Life To Live, which exposed her to the fast-paced world of daytime television. She subsequently booked the part of a rave dancer who tries to lure one of the main characters into a world of drugs, sex, and debauchery on the soap Guiding Light.
Rena realized a move to Los Angeles was required to take her career to the next level. She booked a national commercial for Dell almost immediately and several commercials, print, acting and voice-over work followed. She also has experience behind the camera, having been involved as an Associate Producer on the documentary project To Walk Without Fear (2006) , which premiered at the United Nations in 2006.
Outside of the creative arts, traveling has been, and remains, a love of Rena's. She's dived into the Mediterranean in the south of Turkey, sipped caipirinhas in Brazil, and walked around Zen Buddhist temples in Japan and China trying to find some inner peace. In France, she had the luxury of experiencing Paris as a student, spending her days studying French literature and photography and getting lost in the city with her camera. Rena has visited more than twenty countries on four continents and plans to increase that number as often as possible.
Rena is constantly striving to learn, be it knowledge from a book or hands-on experience, and has dedicated her life to becoming a better artist, which, much to her enjoyment, is a never-ending task.
