DAENA GIARDELLA is a professional actor, director, creativity coach, consultant, teacher, and author. She is frequently invited to give keynote presentations as a motivational speaker and humorist. She has been called a “trailblazer” in improvisational theatre performance and training. Her many original one-woman theater performances have garnered kudos throughout the USA and abroad for over twenty-five years. She is known for her humorous and compelling portrayals of characters who are grappling with the outrageous challenge of being human, as well as for her incisive and satirical perspectives about current world events. The Boston Globe called her an "impressive talent" while the Boston Herald described her as "a talented and gifted actress." The Boston Phoenix hailed her as "an enormously talented performer/improviser with a dancer's agility and a blues belter's larynx...her characters have heft and the advantage of surprise.”
 
Daena was invited to Poland to work with legendary theatre director Jerzy Grotowski in his Theatre of Sources project (featured in the film “My Dinner With Andre”). She has also lived in Tel Aviv where she gave numerous workshops and was invited to perform at Israel’s Susan Delal Center for Dance and Theatre. The Tel Aviv Ha’eer wrote, "Giardella is a phenomenon...a classic actress...an intelligent clown."

Daena has dual backgrounds in the performing arts in organizational development and coaching. She combines these backgrounds to design innovative professional training programs and entertaining educational performances that target leadership & influence, team building, creativity development, presentation excellence, The Art of Change©, dynamic communication, negotiation & improvisation, effective group process, and humor. She has worked with many prominent organizations and world-class companies as a consultant, media/presentation coach, and executive leadership coach. Her coaching practice has clients from virtually every profession, including corporate executives, managers, doctors, educators, psychotherapists, engineers, artists, managers, writers, lawyers, and life coaches.

As an organizational training facilitator, Daena draws upon her extensive knowledge of group systems theory, creative process, and interpersonal skills. She custom designs programs that focus on the themes and objectives of each organization, conference, or educational event. She recently gave a leadership innovation seminar entitled, Improvisation & Influence at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and she led an advanced training in Negotiation Improvisation for the European Commission in Brussels. Among her past clients are The American Heart Association, Hewlett Packard, Babson College, Citibank, Imagine Foods, California Naturals, Mass. W.I.C. Program, The U.N. Copenhagen Conference on Women, Bentley College, Kodak, Omega Institute, New Mexico Human Rights Foundation, and The Royal Bank of Canada.

Daena was featured as a creativity coach on The Cheryl Richardson Life Makeover Show on Oxygen TV and she also appeared on the PBS series Discovering Psychology. She was the host of CURRENTS, a talk and interview radio show on the National Radio Network. As a member of the American Federation of Radio and Television Actors, Daena has recorded many commercials and narrations as a voice-over artist. Her numerous voice-over clients have included Citibank, WGBH TV, WCVB TV, IMC, Health New England, Fidelity Investments, Garelick Farms, Cellular One, U.S. Dept of Navy, Sheraton, and Millipore.

Daena was formerly on the faculty at Boston’s Emerson College and Boston Conservatory. She was also co-founder of TheraVision, a video/theatre process for training psychotherapists at the Kantor Family Institute. As drama director at Roxbury High School under a grant from Harvard University, she directed inner city students in the creation of original plays. She has given diversity and anti-bullying workshops for teachers and students in many educational settings, including the New Mexico Human Rights Foundation.

Daena has inspired workshop participants from all walks of life with her uniquely compelling methods for teaching acting. Her popular ongoing Improvisational Acting workshops have helped stimulate a thriving improvisation community in the Boston area and spawned many improv troops. Her specialty is improvisational theater and she has taught hundreds of improvisational acting workshops for people from all walks of life. She also offers ongoing Your Creative Process workshops designed to help participants cultivate their creativity while working on projects from week to week.

Daena has co-authored a newly released book with Wren Ross called, Changing Patterns: Discovering the Fabric of Your Creativity, which helps readers find ways to overcome the patterns that keep them from being creative in order to live a more meaningful life. She has also released a spoken word CD entitled, Improvisation in Everyday Life.