Hayley Phelan is an actor, writer and journalist. She was born and raised in Toronto, Canada, and is a proud Canuck living in Brooklyn. A recent graduate of the William Esper 2 Year program, her passion for acting comes from a lifelong commitment to story-telling. She spent the early part of her career steeped in words, working at magazines and papers like Vanity Fair and the New York Times, and writing her novel, Like Me (Doubleday, 2021). To her surprise, she discovered acting in her early thirties, delighted to finally find a craft that doesn’t involve sitting alone in a room for hours. Under the tutelage of Barbara Marchant, Deb Jackel, Suzanne Esper and Nancy Mayans, her respect and deep love for fully-embodied story-telling and the craft of acting has only blossomed. She starred in Soonest Mended (Brooklyn Center of Theater Research), and appeared in Expensive Imagination (Heartbreak Collective). While acting is more fun, the control that writing gives her is not something she will ever give up. She aspires to combine the two as a playwright and filmmaker and is currently at work on a feature length script.