Becky Poole is a self proclaimed brain enthusiast and agent of wonder. She hopes to one day seamlessly combine neuroscience, performance art, and sketch comedy into beautiful thought provoking works of art. Ideally she will find the perfect graduate program to allow her to do that while not having to hold a full time day job. In the mean time, she’ll blog about it.

The long of it is, she’s a sketch comedian, actor, voice over artist, and musical saw player currently based in Chicago by way of Seattle by way of NYC by way of Minnesota. She has been described by New York Theatre as having a “commitment to the absurd that is hilariously charming” and New York’s Backstage magazine as being “a bizarre blend of perkiness and rage”.

Becky has been performing, writing, and producing sketch comedy and performance pieces around the country for the last 12 years. Most of that work has been with the critically acclaimed sketch comedy groups MEAT and Becky & Noelle. She co-founded and produced SketchFest NYC, and is currently performing with the Second City’s kids show, Improv Extravaganza Explosion. She went through the training program at iO Chicago, where she also performed her solo show, “Sit on My Lapse” which inspired TimeOut Chicago to title her a “giddy weirdo”. In June she will be appearing as her 6 yr old performance artist alter-ego, Kitty Poole, in the 1st Chicago Womens Funny Festival. She also teaches sketch comedy workshops throughout the country and Canada.

Summer 2009 she toured her solo show “murder, hope”, about brain disorders, neuroplasticity, Batman, and murder ballads, on the Canadian Fringe Festival circuit. Garnering such praise as “This unusual production offers bursts of humor and compelling ideas. It’s non-linear and it’s brilliant.”

Becky started playing the musical saw in 2001 and has been playing it ever since in her own projects, as a special guest with bands like Chicago’s Barehand Jug Band, Seattle’s “Awesome”, LA’s Ditty Bops and as a member of NYC experimental cover band Stickerbook. She has recorded original and tweaked traditional murder ballads with Steve Fisk in Seattle and in Chicago with her band Eileen. You can hear a few of her wackier songs on Animal Planet’s Meerkat Manor website. Listen here.

Becky has done voice over work for Nintendo Wii, The Cartoon Network, Bill Plympton, The Onion Radio News, Blue’s Clues, Blues Room, Between the Lions, PBS, Noggin Network, The Discovery Channel, and many other animated projects and video games. She has performed motion capture acting for FEAR 3 as well as for SIGGRAPH.

Her commercial acting includes ads for Nintendo Wii, Microsoft, and Ubisoft. As well as a pretty sweet Bruce Springsteen spoof/Microsoft industrial that went viral, for better or worse.

This winter she had the pleasure of performing in the Chicago Children’s Theatre’s production of “Goodnight Moon the Musical!” as well as with the Red Kite Project, a project that creates theatre specifically for children with autism. Previous Chicago credits include, Pirates of Penzance with the Hypocrites, Chalk & Saltwater with the Neofuturists, a couple of Redmoon spectacles and as an Artist in Residence with Threshold’s Theatre Arts Project.