We are hardly able to contain the excitement of the news that Sarah O'Toole, the star of "Mystic Minnie", has won the Best Actress award in the Reale Film Festival. Sarah's flawless portrayal of "Minnie" is truly deserving of the award and it feels really good picking it up this early in the festival run. Hopefully, this is a recurring theme. This, coming off the heels of the recent Honorable Mention for Best Acting, is truly amazing.
Sarah is a writer/director/performer and educator from the West of Ireland with over 25 years’ experience in the arts. She trained as an actor at Galway Youth Theatre and the Gaiety School of Acting, Dublin, and as a theatre director at Middlesex University, London. As part of her MA at Middlesex, she spent time training in Michael Chekhov at the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts in Moscow (GITIS) and in Theatre of the East at ISI, Denpasar in Bali. In 2010, She completed further training in the Chekhov technique with MICHA, and in 2014, started a PhD on the subject of gender and embodiment at NUI, Galway.
She has worked professionally as an actor, director and playwright in Galway, Dublin, London and Glasgow and have taught acting, directing and playwriting at Galway Actors Workshop (now amalgamated with Anam Arts) since 2008 and NUI Galway since 2009. She founded and have directed, written and performed in productions by Anam since 2010.