Rising Stars: Meet Allison Dayne of Los Angeles

Today we’d like to introduce you to Allison Dayne.

Hi Allison, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I started out in Boise, Idaho, in a place where “career in entertainment” didn’t really feel like a mapped-out option so much as something you quietly obsessed over and didn’t fully know how to justify yet. I moved around a lot after that different cities, different jobs, trying to stay close to storytelling in whatever form I could get my hands on.

Acting, writing, performing, sketch work. I didn’t really wait for permission to start; I just kept building small rooms for myself and eventually realized I’d been doing that more consistently than I’d been “waiting to be invited into one.”

Along the way, I started directing and making short-form work and sketch content, and that became the most direct line between what I wanted to say and an audience actually seeing it. I wrote and performed a one-woman show, kept developing scripts for TV and film, and built a Substack where I could write in a more unfiltered, narrative voice. I also trained and performed regularly in improv and sketch spaces, including Groundlings, while continuing to work jobs that kept me moving and observing people up close. Which honestly feeds a lot of the writing.

More recently, I’ve been focused on building a consistent body of work across acting, writing, and short-form comedy online. I’ve been putting out sketches, performing regularly, and developing longer-form projects at the same time.

A few of my films have started circulating in festivals and press spaces, and I’ve been steadily growing an audience under the same creative identity across platforms.
It’s less of a single breakthrough moment and more of a compounding one: showing up, making work, refining it, and dong the damn thing.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
A big early struggle was just instability financially, geographically, and emotionally.

Moving between cities and jobs while trying to stay creatively active meant there wasn’t a stable “base layer” supporting the work. A lot of the time it felt like I was trying to build a career in the margins of whatever I could afford or access, which can make progress hard to recognize even when it’s happening.

There’s also the quieter struggle of momentum. In entertainment, you can do a lot of work that doesn’t immediately “turn into” anything visible…projects that don’t get distribution, auditions that don’t convert, ideas that take years to fully land.

That gap between effort and external validation can mess with your sense of trajectory if you’re not careful.
And then there’s the creative identity piece figuring out what I actually wanted to be known for versus what I thought I was “supposed” to do.

Acting, writing, sketch, directing, online content it took a while to stop treating those as separate tracks and start seeing them as one ecosystem.

That shift sounds clean in hindsight, but in practice it came with a lot of trial and error and restarting things in different forms.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
A huge part of my training has been comedy and improvisation. I currently study both, which has completely transformed the way I approach performance and writing.

A lot of my work lives in the intersection between comedy and heartbreak. I love stories that can make you laugh while simultaneously punch you in the chest emotionally.

That balance is what I’m constantly chasing in my work. I create films, sketches, essays, live performances, and online comedy content that explore ambition, womanhood, grief, identity, relationships, and the strange absurdity of being human.

I currently run a YouTube comedy channel called Rage Bait Comedy where Caroline Abbott and myself discuss topics that we laugh at. Who doesn’t want to laugh? I’ve learned that audiences connect most deeply to honesty and specificity.

What many people don’t know is that while so many creators were building online platforms during the pandemic, I was recovering from a life-altering car accident. There was a period where everything slowed down and I had to rebuild physically, emotionally, and creatively.

I think that experience changed me permanently. But honestly, one of the things I’m proudest of is that I’m still here and still in the game. I kept creating. I kept showing up. I kept betting on myself even during moments where it would’ve been easier not to. That resilience now lives in everything I make.

One of the projects I’m most proud of is A King’s Curtain, a short film I co-wrote and starred in alongside Stephen McKinley Henderson, Austin Pendleton, Veanne Cox, Sarah Spring & Charles E Gerber. The film became a love letter to daughters and fathers and went on to win major festival awards including Best Film at Phoenix International, AMT NYC, Burbank, LA Film Shorts and I won best Supporting Actor at Indie Film Shorts.

I also recently directed a short film called Jumpscare that is about to be released, and acted in Rusualka, directed by Braden McClain.

Right now, I’m also performing a one-woman show titled Confessions of a Sugar Baby around Los Angeles, which will be filmed live at the Crow in Santa Monica on September 25th and 26th.

You can currently see me alongside an incredible group of women in the production Baby Bumps, a comedy centered around fertility, womanhood, and modern expectations placed on women. The show completely sold out its run and you can see it at the Hollywood Fringe Festival!

I also write on my weekly Substack which has garnered over 100K readers…who knew people read anymore!

More than anything, I want people to know my work comes from a very genuine place. I care deeply about making people feel less alone. Sometimes that happens through comedy, sometimes through grief, and sometimes through uncomfortable honesty.

My brand, if I had to define it, is emotional truth wrapped in humor. I want audiences to laugh hard, feel deeply, and walk away feeling like they just had a conversation with someone who told them the truth.

How do you think about luck?
What I’ve learned is that luck in this industry often shows up after persistence. I’ve built a lot of my own opportunities from scratch…writing, directing, performing, and producing work before there was any external validation for it.
And then, sometimes, when you’ve already built the thing, the “luck” is simply that people finally notice it.

So I don’t think of luck as something separate from effort anymore. For me, it’s been more like preparation meeting timing, over and over again; especially when I’ve kept creating even when the path wasn’t clear.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.allisondayne.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/allisondayne/ra
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@RageBaitComedy
• Other: https://allisondayne.substack.com