Jeremy Piven and Joyce Piven

Emmy Award winner Jeremy Piven stars as super agent Ari Gold on the HBO series Entourage. Piven is a graduate of Evanston Township High School, Drake University (undergraduate), New York University (graduate), and the Eugene O’Neill Theater.  Piven has acted in over 40 films, including Old School, Runaway Jury, Grosse Pointe Blank, Serendipity, Say Anything, and Black Hawk Down. While growing up in Evanston, Illinois, Jeremy Piven studied at the Piven Theatre Workshop, which was founded by his parents, Byrne Piven and Joyce Piven.

Joyce Piven was one of the founding members and leading actresses at Playwrights' Theatre, the group that spawned Compass Players and Second City.  With Playwright's Theatre, she played leading roles in Midsummer Night's Dream, The Seagull, The Dybukk, Round Dance and Caucasian Chalk Circle and studied extensively with Uta Hagen and Mira Rostova.

Returning to Chicago, she and husband Byrne Piven helped Paul Sills form the Second City Repertory with Bernie Sahlins and Joyce Sloane as well as (with Sills) the original Story Theatre Company. Ms. Piven played Lady Macbeth in the Piven Theatre's futuristic Macbeth, Bessie in Wisdom Bridge's production of Awake and Sing, Lillian Hellman in The Julia Project directed by Shira Piven at New York's Greenwich Theatre, and most recently appeared in Great Expectations at Piven Theatre and in Lookingglass Theatre’s Hard Times.

Ms. Piven is the Co-Founder and Artistic Director Emeritus of the Piven Theatre Workshop and founding director of the Piven Theatre Workshop's famed Young People's Company.  Ms. Piven has directed Lili Taylor in the revival of Maria Irene Fornes' MUD at Victory Gardens and she directed the remounting of Orlando at the Actors Gang in Los Angeles. At the Piven Theatre, she has directed Rochelle Distelheim's Sadie in Love, Caryl Churchill's Top Girls, Sarah Ruhl's adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Brilliant Traces by Cindy Lou Johnson, Speed-the-Plow by David Mamet, and Collected Stories by Donald Margulies, Chekhov’s Three Sisters, Chekov:  The Stories, Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice, Festival of Jewish Stories and this season's Chekhov Stories:  The Emerging Woman.

With Emmy Award Winning son Jeremy and writer/director/daughter Shira, she is dedicated to keeping the Story Theatre method and the Piven Theatre Workshop legacy alive and thriving.

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