Dominic Syracuse

Dominic Syracuse is an actor, musician, and stand-up comedian living in the Los Angeles area. Syracuse was born #5 of 8 children to a Sicilian-American father and a Russian-Jewish mother. He began acting at age 8 in community theater plays and continued throughout high school where he competed in state-wide dramatic arts tournaments, receiving Best Actor, Best Director, and Best Play his Senior year for his adaptation of Stephen King's "Misery", as well as Best Original Script for a One-Act play he wrote titled "Daniel's Day". This success earned him an invitation to the National Performance Arts Festival at Disney World in Orlando, Fl where he was also awarded the Best Dramatic Actor Prize. After being offered a "full-ride" scholarship to university for Theatre and Performance Art in 2007, Syracuse decided instead to drop out of school and pursue a music career in the Pacific North-West with a Rock & Roll band for which he sang and played guitar. The venture proved to be faulty as the band dismembered only days after re-locating, leading Syracuse to a time of homelessness and hospitalization from drug abuse, for which he would later recover. After months in a church-centered rehab facility, Syracuse returned to his home town and finished his degree. From there he was accepted into a summer internship with the Steppenwolf Theater, where he got the opportunity to study the non-traditional methods of the Tony/Pulitzer Prize winning Theater Company. Amid the arrival of his first child in 2011, Syracuse worked both as a Radio DJ and as a touring member of a repertory theater company, however, becoming a new father, he began to believe his dreams of acting professionally were falling away. He had reportedly planned to quit acting entirely and take a job in a distribution factory. This was until he received notice that he had been accepted into the MFA program from the Art of Acting Studio, the official Los Angeles branch of the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York City. (Alumni include Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, Mark Ruffalo) Syracuse moved his family to Los Angeles and attended the school 2 years, receiving his Consolidated Master's Degree in Acting in 2014. Since then, Syracuse also received training in Improv at Groundlings, UCB, Second City Chicago, and IO West, as well as training intensively in the art of Clown and Comedia Del Arte. He proudly serves as Vice President of the Outreach program for the Stella Adler School of Acting wherein he and a group of artists lead acting classes in prisons, homeless shelters, and rehab centers around Los Angeles. He is also a politically driven stand-up comedian and a studio musician, playing guitar, bass, drums, piano, and ukulele