About Chetana Karel Michaan

Photo (c) Donald Rubbo

As an actress, Chetana Karel-Michaan has performed in “The Great Night of Rumi and His Soul Friends”, Dan and Dale Zola’s program of spoken poetry with music and a whirling dervish dance at Freight and Salvage, Berkeley, California.
 
She played the Argentinian mistress Ana in “The Clean House” by Sarah Ruhl with Island Stage Left on San Juan Island, Washington.

Karel-Michaan toured cross-country with The New Shakespeare Company, directed by Margrit Roma, from 1974 to 1990. Her final performance with Margrit’s company was playing Shen Te, in Bertold Brecht’s The Good Woman of Szechuan, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.   
 
An AEA-SAG/AFTRA member, Karel-Michaan is currently based in Berkeley, California. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Dramatic Art from the University of California, Berkeley, and she minored in tear gas evasion.

Her advisor at U.C. Berkeley, Robert Goldsby, later played Socrates to her Diotima in a vignette of Plato’s Symposium that Karel-Michaan composed. Karel-Michaan also trained at the British American Drama Academy at Oxford, London, in 1987.

As a member of the Subterranean Shakespeare Theatre Company, Chetana played the catatonic Sara in Mimzibim! and appeared as Charlotte Bronte in the Bronte Cycle, both written by John O’Keefe – and created a poetical collage with music juxtaposing the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Dorothy Parker.