Paul J. Potenza has worked as an actor and director in the Tampa Bay area for over 30 years. He performed in the first play in the Shimberg Playhouse (then called the Off Center): Eric Bogosian’s one man tour-de-force Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll. Potenza has worked with some the Bay area’s finest theaters including Eckerd Theater Company, The Loft, Tampa Players, Stageworks, freeFall and American Stage. He is happiest about his continued artistic association with Jobsite. In 2011, Paul was honored to win Best Actor in the first Jeff Norton Awards for Felix Unger in The Odd Couple, which also garnered his first Creative Loafing Best of the Bay Award. Other favorites include The MC (Shockheaded Peter), Renfield (Dracula), Edgar Alan Poe (Edgar & Emily), Ulysses (Annapurna, 2015 Best of the Bay Award for Best Actor), Jack (Race), The Player (Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead), Michal (The Pillowman), Nick (The Guys), Johnny (Frankie & Johnny in the Clair de Lune), and Arnold (The Boys Next Door) at Jobsite and Tampa Rep’s The Elephant Man.

Potenza is honored to have completed the Leenane trilogy written by Martin McDonagh: The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Lonesome West, and A Skull in Connemara.  Other directing credits include Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, Topdog/Underdog, Meteor Shower, and Misery. Paul was honored to be a part of the first show done indoors at the Straz after the pandemic closures, directing Giles Davies in Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus.

Paul is a Goldsmith by trade and has owned and operated Design One Jewelers in Clearwater, now in its 44th year in business. Potenza shares his life with his wife Roz (the artist in the family), and their dogs Pinot and Moon Pie who own all the furniture in the house.