Biography

Genevieve McClean hails from Auckland, New Zealand. Though not really known in the United States, she is well known in New Zealand for a variety of film roles. In addition to being an actor, Genevieve is also a video artist and poetry/spoken word performer.Her theatricality compliments both the more language based poetry as well as the performance based hip-hop.

- IMDb Mini Biography By: Jaimes Palacio (poetry event producer)

Genevieve McClean is a New Zealand actress and writer. She began writing poetry as a young child, and began acting and directing in school theatre productions as a teenager. She is an alumni of the New Zealand Drama School, and has also studied at Otago University and Auckland University. Genevieve has lived in Berlin 2001 to 2002, where she worked on some documentary film projects, and also visited the Czech Republic. She toured America as a spoken word artist in 2005. She lives in Auckland and continues to experiment with digital film, writing, theatre performance and poetry.

- IMDb Mini Biography By: On behalf of Genevieve McClean.

Genevieve McClean is known as an actress in New Zealand but has worked in other countries and has visited America as a spoken word artist. She has lived and worked for a time as an actress in Prague and Germany. She lived in Berlin between 1999 and 2001. Over many years she has been exploring various takes on spoken word and performed poetry since she first began presenting poetry as a teenager at Poetry Live, in Auckland in 1991. This fed into a lifelong interest in intersectional performance forms. As well as acting she is a writer and has taken various roles in creating experimental collaborative and independent theatre, film, and interdisciplinary projects. Genevieve has been a guest tutor at all levels in education, and hosted various workshops and classes in creative writing, performance and speaking. She is also a school-teacher and performance and voice coach, and a reviewer of theatre and literature.

Genevieve grew up as a child of a large Auckland family with its roots in the late 19th century/early 20th century European and Mediterranean diaspora. Her mother is Alison McClean, and her father the late David Mitchell, who was a highly regarded poet. She attended Auckland Girls' Grammar School, where she developed a love for performance and art. She has performed on screen and stage since the early 1990's in Auckland when she took her first professional role in Leon Narbey's film The Footstep Man, beginning her career as an actress. She subsequently moved to Dunedin where she sang in the New Zealand band Mink during the several years that she spent at Allen Hall Theatre at Otago University, and worked on various art, film, and theatre projects, including some set and costume design and construction. She wrote and produced her first play since high-school during this time: The Pear Tree. She moved to Wellington and graduated from Drama School, in 1997. On graduating she presented a solo show in the Wellington Fringe festival titled 'Word' and in 1999 worked on the acclaimed play SeeYd as an original collaborative cast member.

In 1999 she left for Europe to take a role in a New Zealand -German Co-production, Der Liebe Entgegen. She lived in Prague and traveled on a research tour in Spain with the theatre company Farma y Jesknyi with the director Viliam Docolomansky before basing herself in Berlin for two years where she performed music and poetry and worked on independent documentary film projects. She attended festivals in Zagreb, Uherské Hradiste, and Venice to promote and accompany New Zealand films.

On returning to live in Auckland she continued acting but her approach to the arts became more diverse. In 2003 she graduated from Auckland University completing her double major in theatre studies and English literature. She performed experimental works such as her hybrid performance /lecture within a conference hosted by Auckland University called Poetics of Exile, and contributed to and created many various projects locally. In 2005 she visited New York to do spoken word, and traveled across America on a poetry road-tour with Corey Frost. She performed during this time as a non-competing slam poet in the American tournament finals. Between 2004-2006 she taught on a course called Interdisciplinary Arts, in Auckland with Becca Wood, Kezia Barnett, and Charlotte 90. In 2011 she completed a 240-minute documentary film project for Ayrlies Gardens. She also completed a small art-poetry film called Stasis, made for installation viewing which was hosted by the film archive in Auckland. She directed and edited these film projects. Twice she produced The Projector Project: a small Poetry-film festival. In 2013 she gained a postgraduate qualification in teaching drama and English. Her locally produced independent and experimental theatre projects as director, writer and producer include: These Four Walls, The Girls, Flock, and The Visitor. These were all installation-performance projects that explore intersectional performance forms to inhabit historically interesting buildings. Her most recent dramatic performances were as 'Pistol' in Henry V, in 2015 at the Pop-Up Globe in Auckland, and as the Mum, in 'Mum's wish' in 2016.

In September 2023 she completed a master's in Communications at the Auckland for which she conducted a research project exploring directing actors in Cinematic Virtual Reality, (CVR) and Situated Cinematic Virtual Reality (Situ-CVR) storytelling with a focus on how to maintain narrative continuity in the experience of the viewer.

- IMDb Mini Biography By: Genevieve McClean