Deena Selenow is a director and creative director for live performance, diversity and inclusion consultant, educator and mother. Gravitating toward highly physical and darkly comedic theatrical events, her interests are rooted in the cultivation of new live storytelling experiences that reframe how we (artists, institutions, audience) understand identity in America.

Helming highly collaborative processes with diverse and visionary artists, Deena leads in the direction of new ideas, creative options, and towards action. Through strategic questioning of both form and content, Deena’s work aspires to create new vantage points for seeing and moving through the world. She cultivates community through the creation and presentation of live theatrical events, understanding the art of performance as a creative exchange of bold ideas and diverse experiences.

Deena’s work includes a combination of directing, choreographing and curating theater, opera, concerts, puppetry, site-specific happenings and themed entertainment with organizations including Disney Live Entertainment, Wynn Las Vegas, REDCAT, Deaf West Theatre, East West Players, Watts Village Theater Company/Los Angeles Theatre Center, Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center, La Jolla Playhouse WoW Festival/Chalk Rep, PRELUDE Festival, LACMA, The Skirball Cultural Center, The Hammer Museum, Highways Performance Space, LA LGBT Center, IAMA Theatre Company, Ammunition Theatre, The Fountain Theatre, Company of Angels, Machine Project, Dixon Place, New York Theatre Workshop’s 4th Street Theatre, and chashama. She was a recipient of the Baryshnikov Art Center Multi-Disciplinary Artist Fellowship (2006), the New York Theatre Workshop Emerging Artist of Color Directing Fellowship (2009/2010), and was a selected participant in the Walt Disney Imagineering/CalArts Initiative (2013). Having served as a Show Director for Disneyland Parks & Resorts since 2021, she is currently a Creative Director with Walt Disney Imagineering/Disney Live Entertainment.

In 2014 Deena was chosen by Theatre Communications Group (TCG) to participate in the inaugural cohort of the SPARK Leadership Program, a branch of the TCG Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Institute, funded by American Express, The Joyce Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Over the course of ten months, she received extensive leadership training at the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) in Greensborough NC, personalized CCL executive leadership coaching, and Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) training with TCG’s EDI Institute. Since then she has designed and facilitated EDI Workshops at Dartmouth College, Occidental College, California Institute of the Arts, and Theatre Communications Group National Conferences in Cleveland, Washington DC and Portland. Additional clients include Kaiser Permanente’s SoCal Educational Theater Program, the Speakeasy Society, and Automata. Deena frequently serves on panels surrounding equitable practices in the arts, and has served on grants panels for LA County Department of Cultural Affairs and Center Theater Group’s Sherwood Awards. She was a member of the inaugural Theatre Communications Group Programming Council from 2017-2018, and from 2017-2019 served on the board of directors at Heidi Duckler Dance, a site-specific dance and dance education company in Los Angeles. She is an Artist Ambassador for the Parent Artist Advocacy League (PAAL), and is an associate member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society.

Deena has taught at the Experimental Theatre Wing at NYU/Tisch, Dartmouth College, Pomona College, CalArts, UCLA, New York Film Academy-Los Angeles, and Occidental College. From 2016-2018 Deena served as the Director of Oxy Arts at Occidental College, where she curated and produced both large-scale and intimate collaborations between the College and community partners, artists and arts institutions in Los Angeles.

From 2006 - 2009 she was co-curator and co-founder of Ad Nauseam Lyceum, a multi-arts collective dedicated to initiating collaborations between emerging visual, performance and media artists in New York. Enlivening dilapidated storefronts and abandoned buildings with unusual arts experiences, Ad Nauseam Lyceum created and curated ten multi-artist immersive installations in Harlem, Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. Over the course of three years, the collective brought together over 50 multi-disciplinary artists in large-scale creative collaboration. 

Deena received her MFA in Directing from the School of Theater at California Institute of the Arts under mentorship of Nataki Garrett, Janie Geiser and Travis Preston. She received her BFA in Drama from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts under mentorship of Anne Kauffman, Rosemary Quinn and Kevin Kuhlke. In October 2015, American Theatre Magazine recognized Deena nationally as a “Person to Watch,” for her adventurous approach to the performing arts and her dedication to diversity and inclusion practices in the American theater.

Originally from New York, she resides in Los Angeles with her husband, son, and their cats.