Lakeside School

by Aicha S-K ’27

Shana Bestock has acted professionally since age 9. She wrote her life’s mission statement when she was 17, in which she envisioned herself running her own theater company. She currently serves as artistic associate of Union Arts Center (the 2025 merger of ACT Contemporary Theatre and Seattle Shakespeare Company), as well as executive director of Penguin Productions, an organization she founded.

The power of the workshop is to rethink the point of time. Our purpose is purely the discovery of the garden, the door, and the Drink Me moment when we shrink or expand to just the right size to walk through. The possibility. — Shana Bestok

At Lakeside, Bestock immersed herself in the arts, taking drama classes, leading Tatler, studying ceramics. After college, she began working back in Seattle as a theater educator, a self-described “drug [she’ll] never kick.” She has worked and taught in numerous Seattle theater and university programs, and helped launch many continuing initiatives, including the School Partnership Program at the University of Chicago and the Rainier Valley Youth Theater.
She credits the continued importance she feels in her work to her mentorship of young artists. “Theater on its own isn’t going to change the world,” she explains. “I want theater to empower us when we’re back out in our daily lives to make the world a better place.”