How mixing theater directing and science makes this multifaceted career juggler better at both.
Susanna Jaramillo EAS’19 spent most of her years at Penn racing between STEM classes and theater rehearsals. One minute she’d be learning about the dynamic responses of linear systems, the next choosing wigs for Hedwig and the Angry Inch or directing a man-eating plant in Little Shop of Horrors.
Her senior year brought two awards: one for designing a chemical process system, the other for leadership in performing arts.
Penn students are notorious jugglers and dabblers, but often that ends when a career begins. Jaramillo has kept at it, leaning in to both professional theater work and full-time science jobs since graduation.
Last fall, about a year into pursuing her PhD in biotechnology at NYU, she was working full-time in a synthetic biology lab while also assistant directing a Broadway play with the Roundabout Theatre Company: Yellow Face, starring Daniel Dae Kim. Either gig could absorb a person’s time and energy reserves. Fortunately, Jaramillo doesn’t really get tired.
“I’m the kind of person who will make things work,” she says. Sometimes that means getting up at 5 a.m., squeezing in a few hours at the lab before a 10-to-6 day of Broadway rehearsals, then returning to the lab to finish her latest experiment.
“Most reasonable people would think that sounds insane,” she laughs. “I think I just have a lot of natural energy that I need to expel. I don’t drink coffee. I don’t really drink tea. I don’t ever feel like I need more energy from something.”
Her latest directing endeavor, Broken Images, opens this November at Paradise Factory Theater—an 85-seat black-box venue in the East Village. It’s a one-woman psychological thriller, written by an Indian playwright and performed by a Southeast Asian actor. Exactly the kind of work she cares about putting on stage.
“Growing up, there was no representation of people like me in theater,” says Jaramillo, a queer Chinese Colombian woman. “I really want to help shift the theatrical canon to include works with Asian people, Latine people, queer people, and really think about the intersectionality of our identities.”
Broken Images marks the eighth play she has directed in the past two years—nearly all of them brand new works by people from marginalized communities. That includes a one-person musical from a gay Chinese creator (Lullabies for Motherf*ckers Vol.2) and a play about archivists searching for lost memories, written by a queer, nonbinary Indonesian writer (The Memory Brigade).
Even as she worked on Yellow Face and subbed in as stage manager for other Broadway shows, Jaramillo sought out these smaller indie projects for her own directing. She says it’s easy for early-career directors to get stuck in the assistant/associate director lane. “My goal for this year has been to direct a lot of my own work,” she says.
She’s also drawn to the edgier stories that indie theater can tell. “I like things that will subvert an audience’s expectations,” she says. “I love complicated characters who make questionable choices that are informed by the totality of their personhood. That’s unfortunately something that we don’t get to see very often.”
In theater, the route to directing gigs is significantly fuzzier than for acting roles. There are no auditions or callbacks; no 32 bars or choreographed routines. “There are fewer people who want to be directors than actors, but also fewer opportunities,” Jaramillo says.
She traces her own spark back to Penn and her first-ever directing experience as a sophomore: the dark comedy Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play for iNtuitons Experimental Theatre. “After that, I was really hooked,” she says.
Even more so after directing Yellow Face her senior year—the same play she would help bring to Broadway six years later. Written by Asian American playwright David Henry Hwang, it’s a direct response to Miss Saigon, a musical she believes to be “pretty racist,” and to white people playing Asian roles on stage. “Over the entire time I was at Penn, no one had done a theater piece for Asian American students with a cast full of Asian American students,” Jaramillo says. The performances sold out.
She continued on, infusing familiar productions with fresh takes. Facing a lack of professional puppeteers on campus, she reimagined the plant in Little Shop as a drag queen perched on a foliage throne. She staged Hedwig and the Angry Inch in a grungy off-campus basement, with standing-room-only tickets and a standby line outside.
“It’s such an exciting thing to be the person who simultaneously sees the big picture but also sees all of the small components,” she says of directing. “There’s no other position in theater like it.”
Sean Begane EAS’20 worked on multiple shows with Jaramillo at Penn and describes acting in her production of Yellow Face as “the most stress-free, controlled, and organized production that I had been a part of.” They’re still friends, and Begane says that Jaramillo excels at bringing people together in her personal life just as she does in her directing. “She’s the glue in a lot of her friend circles,” he adds. “She’s the kind of person that people want to be around and have fun around.”
Jaramillo moved to New York after graduation “to see what would happen” with directing. By the end of 2019, she was splitting her time between a stage manager fellowship with the Atlantic Theater Company and working as a technician at the New York Blood Center. “It was very Hannah Montana vibes,” she says.
When the pandemic ground live theater to a stop, Jaramillo continued working at the Blood Center and applied to graduate school. By the fall of 2021, she was back in Hannah Montana mode, working steadily on shows and in a synthetic biology lab at NYU while also pursuing her master’s there.
She became a directing fellow with the Roundabout in 2022 and landed an assistant directing fellowship from the prestigious Drama League. Right now, she’s midway through the two-year WP Theater Lab program, which nurtures rising directors, playwrights, and producers.
“As the industry continues to reexamine its relationship to Asian artists, I think that she is a very necessary voice in the moment,” says Dominique Rider, a theater director whom Jaramillo calls her mentor. “I’m excited, in the next year or two, to watch her start to get work out of town, to get work regionally … and I can’t wait until she texts me that she’s doing a musical.”
Rider also admires Jaramillo’s refusal to choose between science and theater, believing that more artists should try to juggle multiple things because “it would allow for more interesting ways to think about and arrive at solutions or questions about the way we make art.”
Jaramillo isn’t sure where she’ll be a few years from now when she finishes her PhD. “I joke with people that I’ve been putting off the decision to pursue one or the other ever since I graduated,” she says. “But I’d love to continue to do both. They both bring a lot of fulfillment into my life.”
—Molly Petrilla C’06
