Creator, director, performer (2019)
DYLAN SEDERS HOFFMAN
ABOUT DYLAN
Dylan Seders Hoffman is an actor, singer, and filmmaker based in New York City, originally from Cleveland, Ohio. Her debut short film, which she produced, directed and starred in, was recently lauded as one of the twelve "Best Jewish Pop Culture Moments" of 2022.
As an actor, she has performed Off-Broadway with the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene including in their New York Times Critic's Pick production The Sorceress, with the New Yiddish Rep, and at the New York Theatre Festival.
Dylan is the founder and artistic director of Chava Productions, a film production company which presents original works located at the intersection of pop culture and 21st century Jewishness with a generous dose of Yiddish. Chava Productions’ first short film Yiddish Mean Girls premiered in the fall of 2022. The company's work has been featured in Hey Alma and The Forward.
Dylan is also a creator of devised theatre. She trained in physical devised theatre with Headlong Dance Theatre in Philadelphia. Her full works and excerpts have been presented at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, Headlong Philly, Bryn Mawr College, and Moore College of Art & Design. Additionally, she has self-produced evening length performances in Philadelphia, PA.
Her writing has been published in In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies and thINKingDANCE. She has been invited to speak about herself and her work at the University of Michigan.
She is a magna cum laude graduate of Bryn Mawr College where she studied Devised Dance Theatre and Jewish Studies. She was awarded the Jane Wilkinson Arts Prize for Outstanding Contributions in the Arts from Bryn Mawr College and the Arbeter Ring Prize for Excellence in Yiddish Studies from the University of Pennsylvania.
Dylan is a current second year fellow at the Alliance for Jewish Theatre.
BRYN MAWR INTERVIEW, 2019
What does the next generation of Judaism and Jewishness look like? What possibilities open when we define Jewish continuity for ourselves? And what exists in the space between longing and belonging? These are the questions that inspired Dylan Seders Hoffman ‘19 in creating her senior dance thesis, Fun Kosev Biz Cleveland. Through a synthesis of dance, storytelling, Yiddish song, Hebrew prayer, flowing water, and hot oil, Hoffman and her collaborating artists illustrate the ways in which their generation is embracing, rejecting, and reconstructing their Jewishness.