Bianca Amato

Bianca Amato is a South African actress born in Cape Town who has built a career spanning television, stage, and audiobook narration in both South Africa and the United States. The daughter of politically active parents, she grew up with a close awareness of apartheid and as a teenager belonged to a left-wing organization called Pupils Awareness and Action Group. Amato later graduated from the University of Cape Town.

Amato first gained widespread recognition in South Africa as a founding cast member of the long-running soap opera Isidingo, where she played Philippa De Villiers from 1998 to 2001. Her character's romance with mine manager Derek Nyathi, played by Hlomla Dandala, included the first interracial kiss depicted on South African television and has been described as groundbreaking in the context of post-apartheid broadcasting. The role earned Amato an Avante for Best Actress in a Television Series and a Duku Duku Award for South Africa's Most Popular Actress. Earlier in her career she had won a Vita Award for Best Newcomer for Under Milk Wood and a Fleur du Cap Theatre Award for Best Supporting Actress for Greek, both performed at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town.

In 2002, Amato was granted a United States Permanent Resident Card under the classification of Alien of Extraordinary Ability in the arts and relocated to the United States. That same year she appeared in an episode of the HBO series Sex and the City. Between 2003 and 2005 she took on several leading roles at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota, including Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion, a performance that earned her the Star Tribune Award for best performance of 2004.

Amato's Broadway career spans 2006 to 2013. She appeared in all three parts of Tom Stoppard's Tony Award-winning trilogy The Coast of Utopia during its 2006–07 Broadway run, including Part 1, Voyage, and Part 2, Shipwreck. In 2011 she understudied the roles of Hannah Jarvis and Lady Croom in the Broadway revival of Stoppard's Arcadia, and in 2013 she appeared in a Broadway revival of Shakespeare's Macbeth.

Off-Broadway, Amato's credits include Bill Irwin's Mr. Fox: A Rumination in 2004, the role of Emma in Trumpery in 2007, Calantha in The Broken Heart in 2012, and the leading role of Olga Knipper in Neva in 2013. She also played Amanda in Noël Coward's Private Lives, directed by Maria Aitken, first at the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston in 2012 and subsequently at the Shakespeare Theatre Company's Lansburgh Theatre in Washington, D.C. in 2014. That same year she portrayed Regan in the Theatre for a New Audience production of King Lear in New York. Her work in Private Lives brought her an Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Actress in 2013, a nomination for a Best Actress IRNE Award in 2013, and the Shakespeare Theatre Company's Emery Battis Award in 2014.

Since 2009, Amato has guest starred in multiple American television series. In 2015 she portrayed Delia Alexander in the PlayStation Network series Powers.

Amato has narrated more than 40 audiobooks, among them the majority of Philippa Gregory's historical novels in the Cousins' War series, Charles Stross's 2008 science fiction novel Saturn's Children, and Diane Setterfield's 2006 gothic novel The Thirteenth Tale, which reached number one on The New York Times Best Seller list in its second week of publication. Her audiobook work has earned her ten AudioFile Earphones Awards and two Audie Awards.

Amato is married to Neil Kuny, and the couple has a daughter.