Mary Chieffo
Actor, director, producer, Shakespeare lover, feminist, antiracist, geek (she/her)
Heartbeats producer, Alicia Ayoub & Clare on Heartbeats
Mary Chieffo is known internationally as the Klingon Commander turned Chancellor L’Rell on the Paramount+ series Star Trek: Discovery, most recently returning as her iconic character for the highly popular Star Trek Online. In the spring of 2018, Mary produced, wrote, and starred as Iago in Operation Othello — a gender and color conscious VR adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello alongside Viola Davis and Julius Tennon’s JuVee Productions (Official Cannes XR, Raindance XR Selection). Chieffo received her BFA from Juilliard in 2015, taking on many strong female and male Shakespeare roles, culminating with the title character in Erica Schmidt's all-female Macbeth. For her exceptional work in the four year program, Juilliard presented Mary with the prestigious Elizabeth Smith Voice and Speech Prize and the Saint-Denis Prize for "Outstanding Achievement and Leadership in Drama." After graduation, she participated in workshops of Lover, Beloved: An Evening With Carson McCullers — a one-woman show written by Suzanne Vega and Duncan Sheik. In 2019, Chieffo returned to the LA stage starring in a workshopped reading of Analogue by Christine Boylan as well as the XR stage for Peter Flaherty’s Empire at Sea, an AR project produced by Intel (Tribeca Film Festival Official Selection).