RENO is a stream of consciousness style solo comedic performer living in New York City. Her evening length shows have had several runs Off-Broadway, both commercially and at non-profit venues and tour regularly to the leading regional theaters, museums and performance spaces. She adapted her show RENO IN RAGE AND REHAB into an ACE Award nominated (“Best Writing for an Entertainment Special”) HBO comedy hour. Her show, RENO ONCE REMOVED was commissioned by Lincoln Center for their Serious Fun Festival and sold out with rave reviews. It subsequently moved to the Joseph Papp Public Theater and continued on around the country. She has made other, short-form tragi-comic essays for various outlets such as PBS, VH-1, Comedy Central and National Public Radio, and occasionally contributes written articles to magazines, such as MS.

Reno has done some non-solo acting as well, most notably in Tony Kushner’s first play, “A Bright Room Called Day” also at the Public and as Edith Ann’s shrink (Voice) in Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner’s series of animated specials, “Edith Ann” on ABC TV. She has also made appearances in several motion pictures including Robert Redford’s Quiz Show, Twenty Four Hour Women by Nancy Savoca, Fear of Fiction by Charley Ahearn, Jonathan Demme’s The Manchurian Candidate, and Kinsey, by Bill Condon.

Reno’s four episode series for Bravo, CITIZEN RENO, a kind of non fiction sit-com, aired in 2001 to great reviews. Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner were the executive producers. In 1998, she made a feature film for HBO, RENO FINDS HER MOM. In it, Reno tracks down the mother who gave her up at birth, and uses this verité footage in combination with fictional material she wrote as the search was unfolding. Featuring special appearances by Mary Tyler Moore and Lily Tomlin, it was produced and directed by Lydia Pilcher, written and produced by Reno, with Lily Tomlin, Jane Wagner and Paula Mazur as executive producers. Reno was a fellow at the Sundance Film Lab for this project.

Reno’s show, REBEL WITHOUT A PAUSE: Unrestrained Reflections on September 11th, opened on October 4th, 2001, at La Mama ETC in New York City, where it was extended several times due to critical acclaim. Soon after, it reopened for a commercial run Off-Broadway, with Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner as Executive Producers. REBEL is her rapid-fire witness of the events of September 11th, how they affected her personally and in the context of the world at large. As political events keep changing, so does her show and 2005 finds her continuing to tour with this show.

Nancy Savoca’s (HOUSEHOLD SAINTS, TRUE LOVE, DOGFIGHT) performance film of REBEL WITHOUT A PAUSE had its world premiere September 11th 2002 at the Toronto International Film Festival, was honored by the centuries old Florence Peace Prize, went to the Havana and other domestic and international film festivals and ran in several domestic venues, including in NYC.

In response to unrelenting religiousization in our society, Reno has been writing and performing new work under the title, THE god SHOW. The Peter Reed Foundation and Hartford Stage are sponsors of this work.

Among the myriad benefit performances she has done to contribute to a REGIME CHANGE in the USA, the performance piece she collaborated on with Joan Baez in February 2003 along with the San Francisco premiere screening of Rebel at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco (produced by Marc Huestis) was one of the great successes - Daniel Ellsberg (Pentagon Papers) was the surprise guest. Unfortunately, the U.S. invasion of Iraq went ahead as scheduled the next month.

Reno is among fifteen other distinguished solo performer/writers (Lily Tomlin, Eric Bogosian, Danny Hoch, Spalding Gray, Whoopie Goldberg, etc.) whose work was published in Theatre Communications Group’s Extreme Exposure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts from the Twentieth Century, edited by Jo Bonney.

Personally, Reno is a longtime and happy lesbian, however she doesn’t want anyone getting disappointed if she goes off on International Trade Agreements instead of talking about...well, you know. She used to look up the word ([lez-bee-uhn] in the dictionary a couple of times a week when she was eight or nine. Thinking back, maybe she was trying to meet someone?

Originally, Reno traveled a bit with Lilith Theatre Company out of San Francisco, then started performing solo every once in a blue moon in New York in 1983 at the WOW Cafe, Limbo Lounge, and various funky dives. A couple of years later, she accelerated her performance schedule and played maybe once or twice a month at such wonderful spaces as Dixon Place, the Wah Wah Hut, St. Marks Poetry Project and of course, P.S. 122.

FOR MORE INFO, CLIPS, PRESS, ETC - http://www.citizenreno.com/