Vancouver-born Taryn O’Neill is a dynamic, multi-faceted storyteller with a passion for future-facing narratives. Her background as a nationally ranked figure skater and an Economics, Theater & Film graduate of Duke University, ultimately led her to Los Angeles where she began her career in entertainment at the William Morris Agency... But she didn’t follow the expected industry path.
Pivoting to follow her passion as a performer, she has amassed over 50 credits as an actor across film/TV, digital and commercial, working with such directors as The Coen Bros., Michael Bay and Barry Levinson. But not content with putting her career in other’s hands, she became an early pioneer in the web series and expanded her craft to writing and producing, penning scripts for Black Box TV, co-producing the Streamy nominated AFTER JUDGMENT and writing a full-length sci-fi action series for Stan Lee’s POW entertainment, the teaser premiering at San Diego Comic Con.
Her passion for writing sci-fi cultivated a deep love for science and tech. As a result of a blogpost she wrote in response to a heated debate between Bill Nye ‘the Science Guy’ and an anti-evolutionist, Taryn co-founded SCIRENS, the ‘Screen Sirens for Science’, a creative team advocating for science literacy and developing projects centered around diverse STEM characters. She has appeared on panels at Comic Con, Google and Digital Hollywood, as well as Netflix’s ‘Bill Nye Saves the World’ and ‘Startalk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson’, to discuss her Scirens work.
The collision of these pursuits has lead Taryn to focus her career on impact writing and directing. Her self-scribed directorial debut, the sci-fi short film LIVE, explores the future effects of social media in an AI disrupted world. LIVE won Best Actor at Boston Sci-Fi Festival, screened at Sun Valley Film Fest, SAG AFTRA Foundation Showcase, Geek Fest Film Festival, and was a finalist for the Mary Shelley Award at the Austin Outer Limits Film Festival. It is currently streaming on Gunpowder and Sky’s DUST platform with over 460K views.
She is set to direct her first feature film, a supernatural action romance, for streaming service PassionFlix and has a number of ambitious genre projects in development, aimed at fostering new narratives for our changing world.