Orlando Bishop
Storyteller
Writer? Director? Stand-up comic? Producer? “I’m just a storyteller,” Orlando Bishop explains through a smile. “For me, it’s all about doing what I need to do to serve the project, whatever I need to do to achieve the ultimate goal: A good story, well told.”
Orlando’s own story begins in Flatbush, Brooklyn where he was raised. In the summer of 1989, the Brooklyn boy walked into a Manhattan multiplex to see Do The Right Thing. That incident incited more than a career. A young man had found his calling. “My heart raced. Sweat trickled down the side of my face. I walked out of that theater knowing, ‘I want to do that!’” He chuckles at the memory. “The funny thing is I didn’t even know what ‘that’ was.”
Though he did not know what “that” was at that moment, he set out to find out. His journey took him to Yale University, where he graduated with degrees in both Film Studies and African- American Studies. He then traveled 3,000 miles across the country to attend the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television’s Peter Stark Producing Program. He ended his time in the Stark program by winning its most heralded prize, The Robert S. Ferguson Marketing Award, for the most creative and professional marketing plan in the Master’s Thesis.
Orlando went on to write for a variety of Hollywood companies including Fox Searchlight, MTV Networks, Nickelodeon, and Wesley Snipes’ Amen Ra Films. In the television world, he developed projects for Big Ticket Television (Hack, The Jamie Kennedy Experiment, The Parkers) and New Line Television (Carmen, The Twilight Zone). Then, in the 2005-2006 season, he was hired as a staff writer on the WB’s 7th Heaven. During that season he co-wrote Got MLK?, a special episode commemorating the King Holiday. Most recently, he wrote and directed Dinner For Two, featured by TVOne at the American Black Film Festival (ABFF).
A couple years later, seeking to sharpen his comedic voice, Orlando performed at his first stand- up open mic. What started as an exercise to serve his other writing became a new passion as Orlando performed and eventually hosted shows at The Comedy Store, performed and produced at The Hollywood Improv, and worked rooms throughout LA, the Inland Empire, San Diego, eventually spreading his wings and hitting stages in New York and Chicago, before headlining an Arizona casino.
Over time, that comedic work led to storytelling shows, particularly at Rogue Machine Theatre’s Rant & Rave shows, where he’s performed multiple times and served as a guest producer. Ultimately, all this storytelling, joke telling, and performance experience led Orlando to create Unstuck As F*ck, a solo show Orlando describes as “what would happen if Anthony Robbins and Richard Pryor had a baby.” The show had its well-received world premiere at The Studios of Key West in December of 2021.
Whether slinging jokes on a reservation in Arizona, inspiring through tears and laughter in Key West, hosting his UnstuckAF podcast or crafting dialogue from behind his desk in LA, Orlando Bishop seems to have figured out what “that” was… and what he is… a storyteller.