AWP's IMPROV TROUPE

Troupe Director

​

Canedy Knowles is a director, actor, writer, improviser, human and award-winning klutz.  She’s worked professionally in film, television and theatre for over three decades with series regular, guest star, and recurring roles on television, Off-Broadway and regional theatre credits, small roles in major motion pictures and major roles in small motion pictures, and more commercials than she can count. As a director, her films have screened at film festivals around the globe and won numerous awards, and as a klutz, she’s stubbed her toes on a lot of table legs and banged her elbows on many doorframes.

 

As an improviser, she’s been around long enough to have trained with some of the greats: Viola Spolin’s son Paul Sills (The Committee and Second City), Mike Nichols (The Committee and Nichols and May), Gary Adler (The Groundlings), Charna Halpern (ImprovOlympics), Dan O’Connor (TheatreSports) and her parents: Rex Knowles and Sherry Landrum.  She began her performing career in the first all-kids TheatreSports team: Just Kidding and has continued improvising anywhere she can from 1500 seat arenas to a funeral home and the 100th episode of Queer Eye. For almost two decades, Canedy performed with Chicago City Limits:  the longest running Off-Broadway improv comedy show in NYC- first as a member of the touring company then as a mainstage performer, associate producer and director of the touring company.  She performed Off-Broadway and regionally with Luck of the Draw, the fully improvised musical, ArtProv, and has been a guest improviser at The PIT, The Magnet, UCB, TheatreSports NYC and LA, IO LA,  and at comedy festivals around the world. 

​

On television, she used her improvisational skills as a series regular in the fully-improvised television series, LifeGame (based off the Keith Johnstone form of the same name), as a regular sketch performer on Late Night with Conan O’Brien,  a commentator on VH-1’s 100 Greatest…, improvising 500 thank you songs for AT&T, selling products on TV, in ABC’s hidden camera show: What Would You Do? and extending her character’s screen time on the hit series Odd Mom Out when the show runners realized she could improvise as her character and was really good at it.

​

Canedy was a professor of Improvisation I and II, Comedy and Advanced Acting at the New York Conservatory of Dramatic Arts in NYC, has been a master teacher at colleges and universities across the country including SUNY New Paltz, Chattanooga State, KSU, and LSU, and was a presenter for numerous years at SouthEastern Theatre Conference.  She has taught both short and long form at all levels as well as Improv for Business and Improv for Actors. The show she developed, Match.com(edy), an improvised dating show, had a successful run in NYC and is now an annual event with Improv Mania. She is so stoked to be the director of this hilarious group of Maniacs AND Miniacs! Long live laughter!