Sybil St. Claire

Sybil has taught at the college/university level for over 30 years and is the co-creator of UCF's MFA in Theatre for Young Audiences (one of only six in the nation). She has worked as an Instructor for the New York Film Academy and as an Actor Training Consultant for Walt Disney World Entertainment. Her work has been honored by the University of Central Florida with awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Education, Outstanding Research and Creativity, and Excellence in Academic Partnerships. She has been recognized as a UCF Woman Making History and was voted Outstanding Professor of the Year at Santa Fe College by student government. 

Sybil is the founder of Playback UCF (an interactive form of improvisational theatre in which audiences share their personal stories and experience them "played back" through theatre, music and metaphor). In conjunction with UCF's Counseling and Psychological Services she created Thriving Through the Arts, an immersive and collaborative art-making event for UCF Celebrates the Arts. Most recently, she was awarded the Pabst-Steinmetz Arts and Wellness Innovation grant award for Advocating for Aphasia: Using the Performing Arts to Create a Conscious Community. She is an affiliate of UCF's Women's and Gender Studies and her courses at the Burnett Honors College include Creative Processes: Theory and Practice, Thrive: The How of Happiness, The Art of Storytelling, and Theatre for Social Change.  

Sybil served as an Artistic Director for 20 plus years, serving as both the Founding Artistic Director of All Children's Theatre in Gainesville, Florida, and as the Artistic Director of the Orlando Repertory Theatre in Orlando, Florida. She has received special Congressional recognition from the U.S. House of Representatives for being a "driving force in youth theatre." Over the years, she has shared immersive and often transformative work with populations such as the hearing impaired,  LGBTQ+, sexual violence survivors, children in foster care, police officers, terminally ill pediatric patients, college students, those with aphasia, and the elderly. She served as the first Program Coordinator for the internationally recognized Arts in Medicine program at UF/Shands Hospital. 

As Faculty for the University of Virginia's Semester at Sea program, Sybil taught Acting and Theatre for Social Change aboard the MV Explorer. With a theme of Human Rights and Social Justice in the Mediterranean World, this floating university, with 700 students and 35 faculty, had ports of call in Spain, Italy, Greece, Croatia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Egypt, and Morocco. She has lived off the grid in South America working with disenfranchised populations struggling with drug wars and government abandonment, she has worked with the State Attorney's Office Sex Crimes Division using Playback Theatre to create a safe container for story-sharing and with UCF’s Victim Services to create theatre for social change workshops that augment and ignite Bystander Prevention Training. 

With graduate degrees in both theatre and dramatic writing, Sybil is an internationally produced and published dramatist whose work has enjoyed performances in almost every state, as well as in Canada, Europe, and South America. Her work includes the TYA plays Woolfie and Incantation, the anthologies Monologues for Student Actors II and Scenes and Monologues of Spiritual Experience from the Best Contemporary Plays. She is currently developing pieces for both stage and screen, tentatively entitled The Family Remains and Bloom. Sybil is a union director, an American Association of University Women Fellow, and the recipient of the Drew Randall Courage and Passion award for her work with the terminally ill in artistic settings. Her credits also include work on Yeast Nation (the prequel to Urinetown) at the 15th Annual International Fringe Festival in NYC. She was inducted into the prestigious Scroll and Quill Society for bringing national and international recognition to UCF through her writing. She is a member of The Society for Stage Directors and Choreographers, Playback North America, The Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education, and TYA/USA.

Though diverse, her work shares a unifying thread, using the arts to empower others to live their best lives.