McKenzie is an actor, filmmaker, poet, and educator based in Chicago. She is the writer, producer, and lead actor of the feature film
Olympia with The Line Film Company/30 Pictures, which premiered at the 2018 LA Film Festival.
She has appeared in independent film and on television, including work with up-and-coming director Sam Bailey (Brown Girls) and a recurring role on CBS’s The Red Line. On stage, she has worked with Victory Gardens, Steppenwolf, and Goodman Theatres, as well as Second City in Chicago, and Woolly Mammoth and the Studio Theatre in Washington, DC.
An accomplished poet, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Pank, Rattle, Crab Fat Magazine, and others. McKenzie’s poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net.
She is a 2015 Leonore Annenberg artist fellow and is part of the acclaimed
Growing Concerns Poetry Collective with hip-hop artist Mykele Deville and musician Jeff Austin. The collective released its inaugural album,
We Here: Thank You for Noticing, in 2017, and published its first book of poems "Five Fifths" through Candor Arts in 2018.
