While working on her singing career, Courteney made her professional acting debut in with Genesis Repertory Theater, a Shakespearean theater company on the East Side of New York. She performed in Arias and Sonnets: Scenes from Shakespeare where she performed Kate from Taming of the Shrew, Emilia from Othello, and Ophelia from Hamlet. A few years later, she began to take her acting more seriously, performing the role of The Nurse from Romeo and Juliet to critical acclaim. She also performed the role of Mrs. Dickson in Intimate Apparel with the Readers Ensemble. And made her debut with the Dunbar Repertory Theater, an African American theater company in New Jersey, as The Lady in Yellow from For Colored Girls. Continuing her tenure with the company, she performed as Bessie Smith in a reading of Blues of the Empress, and was a featured soloist in Dunbar’s productions of God’s Trombones and Black Nativity at Count Basie Theater in Red Bank, NJ.
Watch Courteney perform two short monologues - one from Taming of the Shrew by Shakespeare and one from Intimate Apparel by Lynn Notage.

​