Stephanie D'Abruzzo

Stephanie Ann D'Abruzzo (; born December 7, 1971) is an American actress, puppeteer and singer. She has performed various Muppets in the TV program Sesame Street. She held starring roles on Oobi and The Book of Pooh. She was one of the original cast members of the stage musical Avenue Q, receiving a nomination for the 2004 Best Actress in a Musical. Early life D'Abruzzo was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on December 7, 1971, and grew up in McMurray, a Pittsburgh suburb she has described as a "plastic bubble kind of town." She graduated from Peters Township High School in 1989 and attended the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts, a summer program for gifted high school students. D'Abruzzo is a 1993 graduate of the Radio/Television/Film program at Northwestern University. At the university's Communications Residential College (CRC), she could often be caught watching (and, as it turns out, studying) Sesame Street. She had a large collection of Muppet recordings, which she compiled into a mixtape that she auctioned off for dorm fundraisers. Eventually, D'Abruzzo began to consider puppetry as a career, in part as a solution to finding acting roles after she "gained more than the Freshman 15 and [got] a bad perm." D'Abruzzo's production of a puppet television show called Freeform won the National College Emmy award for comedy.