Shira Piven

Piven was born in New York City and moved to Evanston, Illinois, at approximately age six when her parents, Byrne and Joyce Piven, relocated to rejoin Paul Sills, Sheldon Patinkin, and others in the Chicago theatre community. Her parents had been founding members of the Playwrights Theatre Club in 1953, the institution that directly spawned the Compass Players and subsequently The Second City. In 1971 Joyce and Byrne Piven founded the Piven Theatre Workshop at the Evanston Art Center, later moving to the Noyes Cultural Arts Center, where the workshop serves approximately 700 students annually using Viola Spolin's theater games and structured improvisation.

Shira began participating in acting classes at the Piven Theatre Workshop at approximately age nine and was one of the original members of the Young People's Company, the workshop's advanced youth program. She grew up immersed in Spolin-based theater games as a native practice. She attended Evanston Township High School and then Bennington College in Vermont, where she studied drama and music.

After graduating, Piven moved to Chicago and taught acting at Victory Gardens Theatre in the early 1990s, earning strong reviews for directing Born Guilty and Exit the King. She has directed over twenty stage productions across New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.

In the late 1990s Piven co-founded and directed Burn Manhattan, an improvised physical theatre company in New York known for organic, spontaneous performance. The ensemble included Todd Stashwick, Kate Walsh, her brother Jeremy Piven, Spencer Kayden, and Matt Higgins, and performed at the 1998 New York International Fringe Festival. In 1999 she founded the Water Theatre Company in New York, serving as Artistic Director through 2003. Through the Water Theatre Company she adapted and directed works including Pilgrims (based on Elizabeth Gilbert short stories, produced by Mike Nichols) and worked with Nora Ephron to develop Love, Loss, and What I Wore for the stage, which won the 2010 Drama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical Experience.

Piven's film directing career includes Fully Loaded (2011), which won Audience Favorite at the Palm Beach International Film Festival, and Welcome to Me (2014), starring Kristen Wiig as a woman with borderline personality disorder who wins the lottery and launches her own talk show, co-produced by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay. In 2025 she directed The Performance, adapted from an Arthur Miller short story, starring Jeremy Piven as the leader of a dance troupe performing for Hitler in late-1930s Berlin. She married director Adam McKay in 1999. She has also taught improvisation and commedia dell'arte through The Actors' Gang Prison Project and supported the launch of EPICC (Ensemble Play in Cook County Jail) at the Piven Theatre Workshop.