Enter The White Stripes

About Whitney Pastorek

Whitney Pastorek is a writer, director, and international star of stage and screen. She is the senior editor of Pindeldyboz (a literary magazine), and her work has appeared online at McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Eyeshot, Sweet Fancy Moses, within the pages of the American Journal of Print, and over the airwaves for NPR's Morning Edition.

Originally from Houston, Texas, Whitney graduated from New York University in 1996 with a degree in theater. One day in late 1997, she realized she had very few marketable skills and could not spend one more day managing the Gap for fear she might never escape from that horrid denim-riddled wasteland. So she packed up everything she owned, loaded it on Amtrak, and rode the train for 2 days straight to spend a year on the clock doing manual labor at a summer camp in Mount Ida, Arkansas (population 924). Upon her inevitable return to New York, she took a job teaching theater at her alma mater and began creating her multimedia empire.

She is the director of THE AMERICANA PROJECT, a reading series dedicated to bringing new fiction to the stage in the form of "theater-things"; the first complete Project was staged in the summer of 2001 and named a "Pick of the Week" by Time Out New York. She is also the founder of a new and exciting theater movement called Inconsequentialism, and plays produced by No One In Particular (her semi-fake theater company) have disrupted virtually every free theater festival below 14th Street.

Her directing credits include OUR TOWN VS. ASSORTED INSTRUCTION MANUALS, IT'S ALL ABOUT ME, THE MYSTERY OF IRMA VEP, and some cheesy musicals like FALSETTOS and CHESS that secretly she likes best. She is the former associate artistic director of the Obie award-winning Salt Theater, and as an actress, she has appeared in everything from THE CHERRY ORCHARD to a VH1 game show about Vanilla Ice. She is also slowly making a name for herself as the best girl-who-sings-80s-hair-metal-song-medleys-on-her-acoustic-guitar on the East Coast.

A complete list of everything is constantly in flux over at www.whittlz.com.

Currently, Whitney lives in under the Triboro Bridge in Queens, and has no husband, boyfriend, roommate, kids, pets, or plants. She still works at NYU (though now it's just part time and as a graphic designer), teaches music at an elementary school for autistic children, and is trying to watch less emotionally self-destructive television.