Nonfiction
Chicago, IL
Amanda Dunne Acevedo is a Chicago-based artist, educator, and mother. Amanda was raised in Gages Lake, Illinois and received her B.A. in Theatre from Miami University (Ohio) and Ed.M in Arts in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. During her undergraduate studies, Amanda was drawn to multidisciplinary performance, performance art, and theatre for social justice. Her work has always existed in a hybridized space of performance, storytelling, theatre, devising, movement, and being in community with audience.
Amanda worked as an arts educator and administrator in Chicago from 2008-2022. She was the Director of Education at Northlight Theatre, a Lead Teaching Artist and Senior Manager of School Programs with Steppenwolf Theatre Company, and taught a Teaching Artist Seminar and Practicum course at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). She has crafted and facilitated arts education professional development workshops for Ingenuity, Lincoln Center Education's Summer Forum, Harvard Graduate School of Education and Kennedy School, Steppenwolf Theatre, Miami University, Pennsylvania State University, and University of Texas at Austin. She still works with high school aged youth as an editor and Essay Coach with the Los Angeles-based College Essay Guy.
She co-founded and has been making performance with Genesis since 2008. In February 2026, Genesis remounted their 2023 work there are no dead people at Lincoln Center’s David Rubenstein Atrium after sold-out runs in 2023 and 2025. During the summer of 2026, Genesis will remount their 2016 performance, while our blood’s still young, a piece designed to be revisited and performed every 10 years.
Amanda’s work has been seen at 2nd Story, Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Links Hall, Wedge Projects, Strawdog Theatre Company, Chicago Theatre Marathon, South Side Story Club, Chicago Artists Month, and Chicago Home Theatre Project. She has artistically collaborated with Dandelion Theatre, Vintage Theatre Collective, Red Tape, and Tympanic Theatre Company. She has curated and produced multidisciplinary salons for Harvard’s Bok Center, Around the Coyote, Genesis, and Tympanic.
Central to Amanda’s writing is her experience as an adoptee, and her relationship to grief. She has been an avid diarist and documentarian of her own life since age 6. In 2015 she began working on a creative nonfiction piece of writing, Adopting, that she has since revisited in 2017 for the Chicago Theatre Marathon at Strawdog Theatre Company, then in 2018 at small shares, a salon event she hosted at Wedge Projects. The next iteration of this work was performed in 2023 for 2nd Story at Haymarket Pub. Her story is featured on the 2nd Story podcast, Episode 265. She was also interviewed by Dana Black for the I Swear on My Mother's Grave podcast for Season 3, Episode 22.
Amanda resides in Rogers Park, Chicago, with her husband Chris and daughter Lola.