Cassandra Han - Biography
New York casting credits include the feature films Grind , starring Billy Crudup and Adrienne Shelley (Sundance 1994), Me and Veronica, with Elizabeth McGovern, Patricia Wettig, Micheal O’Keefe and John Heard, and blessing (Sundance 1993). Her early mentors were Primetime Emmy-award winning casting duo Sheila Jaffe and Giorgianne Walken (who cast The Sopranos and Entourage among others).
Cassandra’s television casting credits include projects for America’s Most Wanted, the History Channel, the Popcorn Channel and Sesame Street. In collaboration with Emmy Award-winning producers Terra Associates, she has cast numerous educational video projects for premium publishing houses like Scholastic (the company that published the Harry Potter series), Harcourt, Pearson, and Oxford Press. She also taught casting workshops for directors enrolled in the graduate division of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and audition workshops for actors at the School for Film and Television in New York.
Theatrical casting credits include Wild Men , an off-Broadway play starring George Wendt from Cheers , several simultaneous national tours of Love Letters , a Pulitzer Prize-nominated play that featured two new stars every week: Cassandra helped cast and/or negotiate contracts for many celebrities including Matthew Broderick, Helen Hunt, Shelley Long, Christopher Reeve, Elaine Stritch, and Edward Herrmann and also toured with the production as a company manager.
Cassandra’s other film and television production credits include The Basketball Diaries starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg and Juliette Lewis, the PBS documentary series The Human Language and the children’s television series Way Cool .
Cassandra was a founding member of Ethan Hawke’s New York-based theater company, Malaparte. Between 1991 and 1995, she worked for the company in a variety of different roles including casting, producing, literary management, dramaturgy, directing and acting. Fellow company members and guest artists included Gwyneth Paltrow, Martha Plimpton, Calista Flockhart, Robert Sean Leonard, Steve Zahn, Frank Whaley, Peter Frechette, Austin Pendleton, Josh Hamilton, Callie Thorne, Peter Dinklage and Lisa Loeb.
Cassandra also worked in the New York commercial theater with celebrated producer Richard Frankel, winner of 36 Tony Awards, 47 Drama Desk Awards, 4 Grammy Awards, and 2 Pulitzer Prizes. In addition, Cassandra worked in stage management at the Tony Award-winning La Jolla Playhouse ( Four Rooms with Amanda Plummer, The Fool Show, Nebraska, Life During Wartime ) and at the Opera Company of Philadelphia, where she was a score reader for Lucia di Lammermoor and Luisa Miller with Luciano Pavarotti and The Saint of Bleecker Street, written and directed by Gian Carlo Menotti. She also worked in production on Johnnie and Jazz: Masters in Monaco, an international jazz festival that was held in Monte Carlo and sponsored by Johnnie Walker.
She holds an MFA in acting and has been featured on prestigious New York stages such as the Public Theater, Mabou Mines, New York Stage and Film, Soho Rep and New York Theater Workshop. She also appeared over the course of three seasons at the Tony Award-winning Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island. One of her favorite projects there was David Henry Hwang’s world-premier adaptation of Peer Gynt , directed by Stephan Müller. She was also featured in a public service announcement with Penn and Teller, which ran on several New York City television stations. In South Tyrol, Cassandra has worked as a recording artist for films or installations at the Gardens of Trauttmansdorff Castle, South Tyrol Museum of Archeology, Touriseum and Andreas Hofer Museum. She provided English voiceovers for the iTunes app Giracittà, recording the audio guides to New York City, Amsterdam, and St. Petersburg. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1990.