If you're looking for a hit-it-and-quit-it bio, go here.

Colleen Wainwright is a Los Angeles-based writer/dog-lover/trudger-among-trudgers on a thus-far lifelong quest to better connect with her fellow living beings.

After graduating from Cornell University, Colleen worked at a handful of large-ish advertising agencies in New York and Chicago, writing mostly television copy for such brands as Hallmark, Lincoln-Mercury, Gatorade and Michelob Light (although it was not until she was a freelancer that she scored the coup of her copywriting career, writing a Wheaties campaign for Michael Jordan, which is reason enough for quitting your day job).

She and her then-husband subsequently moved to Los Angeles, where she co-wrote two pilot episodes of a really great children's show that, despite being nominated for an Emmy, went absolutely nowhere. Fed up with writing bad screenplays she couldn't sell, Colleen signed up for classes at the Groundlings. Eventually (and appropriately) booted from the Sunday Company for complete lack of chops, Colleen concluded that the wisest path was train to become a proper actress; two years later, she was earning her living in television commercials, proving that there truly is no escape from irony.

In 2002, Colleen experienced what she can only characterize as an epiphany when she was hospitalized for 11 days with an acute onset of Crohn's disease. Determined to regain her lost weight and health, she made a series of radical lifestyle changes, including adopting the Specific Carbohydrate Diet that thousands of IBD patients have used to "cure" themselves of Crohn's and ulcerative colitis. Shortly thereafter, along with her friend (and interstitial cystitis patient) Jan Pessin, she wrote #1 & #2, an original comedy chronicling their experiences with illness and recovery which they workshopped in the spring of 2004 to great enthusiasm, including that of her gastrointestinal practitioner, who (to his everlasting credit) actually laughed along with the tent-pole musical number, "Dr. God."

For several years, she threw herself headlong into the world of networked communication, launching her primary website, communicatrix-dot-com, in November of 2004 and her popular "Act Smart!" column for L.A. Casting in September of 2006. Along the way, she’s written for a number of online outlets that have come and gone, and two bona-fide chapters of an outstanding book.

In 2011, she decided to put all of this social-media marketing stuff to some good use, vowing to raise $50,000 for a girls-centric non-profit in the 50 days leading up to her 50th birthday, and to shave her head if she reached her goal. She surpassed her goal by over $10,000, and has felt free to disregard culturally normative hair standards since.

These days, she earns her living working in operations for a wonderful entertainment-adjacent finance company, about which there is really nothing to say other than “Holy shit, amirite?”

Updated July 10, 2022.