Actor, playwright,  Ned Van Zandt was one of the founding performers of La MaMa Hollywood, a West Coast extension of La MaMa in New York. During his freshman year of college, he was cast in his first Off-Off-Broadway play A BOY NAME DOG (1973) at the WPA Theater, after being discovered at the hangout restaurant  Phebe’s by playwright  Joseph Renard. From there, he became a notable name within the community.  Other Off- and Off-Off-Broadway credits include CONCERNING THE EFFECTS OF TRIMETHYLCHLORIDE (1973), WORLD WAR ZERO (1977), RIGA (1989), THE ALEXANDER PLAYS (1996), THE MILK TRAIN DOESN’T STOP HERE ANYMORE (1996), and GOOD TELEVISION (2013). Van Zandt has also been a prominent figure in the theatre communities of Los Angeles, London, and Hawaii. His credits include THE HAUNTED HOST (1975), CLEANING HOUSE (1974), HOW I CAME TO BE HERE TONIGHT (1974), A QUICK NUTBREAD TO MAKE YOUR MOUTH WATER (1974), UNDER THE CLOCK (1975), and FROST/NIXON (2008), RED (2014) and his own one man play DEL VALLE (2018).

Van Zandt was born in Fort Worth, TX. His second cousin was singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt. He spent his childhood moving for his father’s oil company job to places such as Venezuela, Rome, and London before going to boarding school in Lenox, MA. It was there that he caught the acting bug after performing in a dorm mate’s play. Van Zandt went on to study at NYU with Olympia Dukakis. He was a resident of the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan during the late 1970s, becoming friends with people such as Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. Van Zandt appears as himself in the documentaries Who Killed Nancy? and Sad Vacation, as he was present in Room 100 the night of Spungen’s murder. He made his Broadway debut in The Iceman Cometh (1999), playing Lieb and understudying several other roles. Describing himself as “bi-coastal,” Van Zandt has acted in television and film as well as the stage, splitting his time between Los Angeles and New York. He is known for his roles in the films Coming Home, MacArthur, The Iron Orchard and HBO’s All The Way, as well as his work on shows “The Blacklist,” “Power,” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”