Alana Kerr Collins was born and raised in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and has been acting and singing from an early age. She was a member of the National Youth Theatre (NYT), National Youth Music Theatre (NYMT), Youth Music Theatre UK (YMT: UK) and was the first young People's Representative for Music Theatre 4 Youth (MT4Uth).  She is an Audie Award and AudioFile Earphones Award winning audiobook narrator with over 100 titles for major publishers under her belt.

 

Educated at the University of Dublin, Trinity College she was awarded a joint 2:1 in her BA (Hons) degree in Drama and English. It was during her Christmas break in her penultimate year that she took on her first professional role, playing Cinderella at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast.

 

Since then she has performed in wonderful venues all over the UK and Ireland including at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, at Belfast's Grand Opera House and Lyric Theatre, Dublin's Canal Theatre and Manchester's Lowry Theatre in everything from musical theatre to Shakespeare. She has worked as a television presenter for UTV and is even a Sesame Workshop trained puppeteer.

 

Alana is a keen supporter of ongoing performance training and in 2009, founded the Belfast Actors' Studio to help support, encourage and facilitate ongoing training within the local acting community. In 2011, she undertook a year's training in the Meisner technique at the Impulse Company in London with Scott Williams, himself a former student of Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York.

 

From 2013 - 2021 Alana lived in Los Angeles where she undertook training at the Margie Haber Studio, Ivana Chubbuck Studios and the Clyde Bernardy Acting Studio whilst enjoying some well-earned  sunshine!