Starting Over, Again and Again
Regina De Vera (she/her) is an actor, educator, and intimacy professional born and raised in Quezon City, Philippines. Regina has had a storied journey full of twists and turns both professionally and in self-discovery.
Highlights include playing Portia in Der Kaufmann, a Filipino adaptation of The Merchant of Venice, from which she won “Outstanding Female Lead Performance in a Play,” at the 2013 Gawad Buhay! The PHILSTAGE Awards for the Performing Arts. In 2015 she was accepted at The Juilliard School in New York and had the privilege of playing iconic roles such as Irina in Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters (2012), Little Red in Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into the Woods (2018), and Mother Courage in Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (2019). In her final quarter at Juilliard, she booked her first professional lead role in the Steve Martin farce, The Underpants (2019) directed by Tony Award-winning director, Walter Bobbie (Chicago, Sweet Charity) at the Tony Award-winning regional theater, The Old Globe in San Diego, California.
In a seemingly counterintuitive move, Regina returned to the Philippines in 2021 – and started over. She rebuilt her life by forging new identities – and explored other mediums of expression. After discovering that former students from the Philippine High School for the Arts were sexually and emotionally abused by members of the faculty, she channeled her purpose to become one of the pioneering intimacy coordinators and directors in the country. Accounting for her personal experiences of abuse as a younger artist and the privilege of studying at Juilliard, she has become an educator that champions care-based practices as the new standard for high-quality artist training.
Photo by Corinne LouieOutside of her multi-faceted work, she can be found geeking out on nutrition, writing & meditating, and doing Filipino martial arts at UP Diliman.
