"I got in deep," Colón-Zayas says, her eyes turning glassy. "There was no sexual abuse or physical violence to me. And I never witnessed that. It was mind control."

She eventually returned to New York and, after some vacillating, broke ties with the church. She attended SUNY Albany and her world opened up after she saw a play by Native American women. "I remember thinking, 'This is what I want to do.'"

She has been a part of the LAByrinth Theater Company since its founding in 1992 and began her acting career off-Broadway, appearing in productions of Quiara Alegría Hudes' "Water by the Spoonful" and originating numerous roles in Stephen Adly Guirgis' works including "In Arabia We'd All Be Kings," "Our Lady of 121st Street" and "Between Riverside and Crazy." (She reprised her role in "Between Riverside and Crazy" for a third time in 2022, making her Broadway debut in the process.) She also wrote, produced and starred in "Sistah Supreme," a semi-autobiographical solo show about growing up Latina in New York in the 1970s and '80s.

"LAByrinth became my artistic community," says Colón-Zayas, who felt frustrated by both the scarcity of roles for Latinx actors and the stereotypical tones roles often had. "That's always my advice to young people: Find your artistic community. Find the people who hold you up. It could be just two or three of you, but if they hold you up and you have the same interest and you want to meet in your house and do writing exercises and read scenes or whatever, it helps you stand taller."

According to Guirgis, a longtime friend who directed "Sistah Supreme," what makes Colón-Zayas so compelling as a performer is her push for truth and that she draws from a deep well of lived experience.

"She's always going to give you 100% of her heart, and that is going to end up being something onstage that's going to be painful, funny, truthful, outrageous but real. Her acting doesn't seem like acting," he said.

After years of small roles in shows like "Law & Order," "Sex and the City" and "Nurse Jackie," Colón-Zayas got her first recurring role in 2019 on the short-lived OWN drama "David Makes Man." In 2021, she booked another recurring role in HBO's revival of "In Treatment." Then came the role of Tina on "The Bear."

Her husband commended her perseverance as an actor, maneuvering through disappointment and frustration but eventually finding mainstream visibility.

"The way she dealt with the reality at the time, which was there weren't many opportunities for someone like Liza, and her struggles with it, yet finding ways to get through it," Zayas says of his wife. "She's got a great reputation in theater, she's done amazing work in theater. So just watching her continuing to move forward is inspiring."

In her youth, Colón-Zayas got some experience working in restaurants. She worked at a doughnut shop and the counter at a deli, and waited tables at a family-owned Italian restaurant in Albany. "I was always spilling something or getting orders wrong," she says.

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