About
Alyssa Rallo Bennett is an award-winning multi-hyphenate director, producer, and composer/performer — known professionally as Rallo Bennett — from NYC, recognized for creating inclusive and socially conscious films.
Her directorial debut feature film, The Pack, accepted into Tribeca Film Festival and featured in over a dozen others, tackled personal responsibility with an open-ended narrative that pays homage to Twelve Angry Men. The film, starring Lucie Arnaz, Elisabeth Moss, and Zach Galligan, streams on major platforms such as Amazon Prime Video and Tubi, along with her second feature, Aberrant, a dramatic thriller starring Jack Quaid and Tibor Feldman, distributed by Green Apple.
Her feature film ReRUN, starring Christopher Lloyd, premiered as the closing night film at the 2018 Woodstock Film Festival, earning her a Maverick Award nomination and multiple festival wins and critical acclaim, streams on Amazon, Fandango, Plex, YouTube TV.
The Arrival, her fourth feature, released recently by Gravitas Ventures featuring Pooya Mosheni and Peter Bradbury, received critical acclaim, premiering as one of four films at the Martha’s Vineyard Women’s Film Festival, and subsequently as the closing night film at Big Apple Film Festival in NYC.
As a producer and actor, she developed and co-produced Rain Without Thunder, a dramatic film starring Jeff Daniels, Linda Hunt, Steve Zahn, and Ming-Na Wen, about reproductive rights that premiered at San Francisco Film Festival and in NYC at Human Rights Watch Film Festival, considered a cult classic pre Handmaid’s Tale and featured in over a dozen international festivals including, Berlin and Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).
Rallo Bennett’s short have premiered in festivals such as Newport Beach, Santa Cruz, Cinequest, Soho FF, Northampton, BAFF… including Compulsion, Them, Crowbar, Floating Rectangles, Uberpool, the series The Madness of Art, and most recently, The Dishwasher just back from Phoenix & Sedona Film Festivals.
Recently, she directed a new feature & pilot, Scarecrow, starring Marin Hinkle, currently in development as a new series.
She has continued to produce, develop, and support emerging artists, diversity, equality, and inclusion at Stonestreet Studios, an independent film studio she co-founded with her partner, writer/director Gary O. Bennett. Known for its socially conscious films, the studio often creates work that deals with human rights alongside the renowned Stonestreet Screen Acting & Production Residency, a unique immersive program she founded that is the exclusive screen acting program for NYU Tisch Drama actors, directors, writers, and producers. The residency program has given many actors and hyphenates their start: Rachel Sennott, Miles Teller, Rachel Brosnahan, Danny Ramirez, Idina Menzel, Nik Walker, Xosha Roquemore, Jocelyn DeBoer, Beanie Feldstein, Camila Mendez, Alberto Rosende, Coral Pena, Jack Martin, Francesca Reale, Ximena LaMadrid, Jack Quaid, et al.
Known in the music world as Rallo Bennett, her music background has been an integral part of her filmmaking—whether listening to the variation in a score or an actor’s voice, or telling visual stories via song. American Pancake wrote about her debut album ANYMORE: “The fluid, diverse indie rock storytelling of Pinch That Vein feels like a movie you want to watch.” The ANYMORE album and her singles also received great notices. Closets, The Pitch, and Don’t Wake Me have taken off globally, streaming on all platforms. Her most recent song, Eggshells & Rollercoasters, received critical acclaim, including RMAS: “The track's lush instrumentation and hypnotic melodies mirror the emotional turbulence of love, delivering what is perhaps Rallo Bennett's most poignant work to date.”
She continues to play live in venues such as Rockwood Music Hall NYC, Pearl Moon, Woodstock, 76 House NY, Rock Da Casbah & Diner 9W, Saugerties, Kulak’s Woodshed in LA, and The Bitter End NYC.
Bennett’s first training ground started as an actor, working with directors such as Franco Zeffirelli, Andre Gregory, and Martin Scorsese. She has directed, acted in, and developed plays at Ensemble Studio Theater, Harold Clurman Theater, and Sundance Institute’s Playwriting Lab. She has an MA from NYU Gallatin in Drama & Psychology and a BFA from NYU Tisch Drama, where she collaborated with Nikos Psacharapolous, Tom Fontana, David Margulies, and independently with the Group Theater’s Robert Lewis.