liana mesaikou
WRITER – COMEDIAN HOST
Feminist * Immigrant * Storyteller
Liana Mesaikou is an LA-based Greek artist (actress, comedian, writer). She has acted in a number of theater productions in Greece, London and LA. She earned her Master’s in Text & Performance Studies at King’s College London & RADA, and has studied comedy at The Groundlings, iO West and Second City. In 2019, she completed her MFA in Screenwriting at UC Riverside where she developed two comedic interactive projects for kids as part of her Gluck fellowship. Liana wrote the script for the 12th Orpheus Awards at the LA Greek Film Festival in 2018, and was a contributor on Ladies Night Live. Her first one-woman show Fifty Shades of Melania premiered at the Hollywood Fringe Festival in June 2019, and traveled to the New York Fringe in October. She was a member of the all-female group “Butter Sketch Comedy”, and she’s also a member of “The Interlocutors”, a long-form improv team. She can be seen around LA performing improv and sketch comedy at venues such as the Gary Austin stage at the Groundlings, Second City, the Pack Theater etc., as well as your zoom screens! Liana loves making people laugh, because it will be the closest she’ll ever get to being a heart-surgeon. And her grandmother always wanted her to marry one!
CHELSEA SUTTON
PRODUCER
Chelsea Sutton is the producer/co-creator/co-host of the Nice Girls Podcast which discusses pop culture, self-discovery, politics and dives into the details of who we are, who we are expected to be, and everything in between. Chelsea is also a theater producer, director and writer. She was a 2016 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, and her fiction has appeared in Bourbon Penn, Cosmonaut Avenue, Pithead Chapel, Craft Literary, and Blood Orange Review, among others. Her plays have been finalists for the O’Neill Playwrights Conference, and the Woodward/Newman Drama and International UNIMA Young Writer awards. She co-wrote with Lisa Dring the acclaimed immersive production Kaidan Project: Walls Grow Thin and her play Wood Boy Dog Fish received its second production in the inaugural season at the Garry Marshall Theatre in 2018 – both written and produced with Rogue Artists Ensemble. Her short film script And She Kept Walking was a semi-finalist for the SHIFT Creative Fund. The Long Way, a short film co-written by Chelsea Sutton and co-written and directed by Michele Santoro, is currently on the film festival circuit. She is a member of the Dramatists Guild and an ensemble member with Rogue Artists Ensemble. She’s the co-director of Rogue Artists Ensemble’s Rogue Lab New Play Incubator. Check out more about her work here.
dimitris mesaikos
ETYMOLOGY CORRESPONDENT
My dad is one of the most hard-working people I’ve ever known. He was born in Neo Souli, a small village near Serres in the North of Greece. At age 15, he moved to Athens because he was determined to get an education, and he worked nights to put himself through high-school. He’s the first one in his family to go to college. He studied Classics and throughout his long career teaching (primarily) ancient Greek and Latin in high school, he did a Masters degree on the subject of ancient proverbs, and he published a book on Latin to help high-school students with the . He also developed extra-curriculum activities that engaged the students creatively: he created the first student-run newspaper in our high-school, he created an award-winning website for the middle-school of Neo Souli when he served there as the principal, and he helped put together a recipe book with traditional recipes featuring the women of the village.