CAROL MAYO JENKINS has enjoyed a very long and rewarding career in theatre and is delighted to still be considering herself a "work in progress." She began her studies in London at the Central School of Speech and Dramatic Art and then became a founding member of the progressive and still controversial Drama Centre, London.

Returning to New York, she was simultaneously cast in a Broadway play, Philadelphia, Here I Come, and the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. Wisely, she followed Bill Ball's siren call to his extraordinary repertory theatre where the actors were in constant training and constant performance-- often as many as five plays in a season. Among her roles there were Abigail in The Crucible, Olivia in Twelfth Night, Natasha in The Three Sisters, and Jocasta in Oedipus Rex.

After four years, Miss Jenkins returned to New York where she performed both on Broadway and Off-Broadway, the former including First Monday In October with Henry Fonda and Jane Alexander, The Suicide with Derek Jacobi, and Oedipus Rex (again!) with John Cullum. Off- Broadway she was Jennet in The Lady's Not for Burning, Madeleine Bejart in Moliere in Spite of Himself, and Zinnia in the one-woman show for which she won a Drama Desk nomination. She also began her long-standing love affair with regional theatre with roles including, among many others, Helena, Beatrice and Olivia (again) at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival, Regan in King Lear and Lady Macbeth, both on film for PBS and at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta.

In the early 1980s she was cast in the award-winning television series Fame, and for five years played English teacher Elizabeth Sherwood. By then her home had become the West Coast where she continued her theatre work at Seattle Rep, the Old Globe in San Diego, and San Jose Rep, as well as the Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia, Cleveland Playhouse and Denver Center Theatre. Significant roles were Mary Tyrone, La Marquise de Merteui, Arkadina in The Sea Gull and Esme in Amy's View. Edward Albee cast her as Martha in his production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with which she toured Lithuania and Russia. Just before leaving California she appeared in By the Bog of Cats with Holly Hunter.

Miss Jenkins now lives in her hometown of Knoxville where she is on the faculty of the University of Tennessee and occasionally works with the Clarence Brown Theatre. Recently she has returned to California to do Enchanted April and Collected Stories.