If you had a television in the nineties, you knew her face before you knew her name.
She was Dana Foster on “Step by Step,” the smart, poised, slightly prim older sister in one of ABC’s big Friday-night family comedies. The show ran from 1991 to 1998, first on ABC and then a final season on CBS, and for most of that decade Staci Keanan was one of those young actresses who felt like she had always been on the air.
Which, honestly, she nearly had. She started young. Before Dana, she was Nicole on NBC’s “My Two Dads” back in 1987, then Lindsay on the short-lived “Going Places.” By the time “Step by Step” wrapped, she had spent almost her entire childhood and teenage years on soundstages, under the laugh track, hitting her marks on cue.
And then, more or less, she stepped off.
There was no scandal. No flameout. None of the sad tabloid arc people brace themselves for with a former child star. She just quietly stopped chasing the next role. For a long stretch, if you were a fan, you would have had no clue where she went.
Here is where she went. She went to law school.
Staci Keanan, whose real name is Anastasia Love Sagorsky, enrolled at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles and graduated. In 2013 she was admitted to the California Bar, and she practices under her real name, not the one from the old opening credits. The girl who played the polished teenager on a family sitcom became, of all things, a prosecutor.
She started as a deputy district attorney in Riverside County in 2014, working serious and violent crime. Since 2016 she has been a deputy district attorney with Los Angeles County. And since early 2021 she has gone back to Southwestern, the school that trained her, this time standing at the front of the room, teaching law as an adjunct professor.
Sit with the shape of that for a second. A kid who grew up pretending, on camera, in front of millions, walked into the most real room there is, a courtroom, and stood up on the side that speaks for the people who were hurt.
She has kept the rest of her life quiet, too. She married actor Guy Birtwhistle in 2017, and she does not lean on the old fame. No reunion-circuit desperation, no “remember me” energy. When people do place her, it tends to catch them off guard, because the last table you expect to find Dana Foster sitting at is a prosecutor’s.
There is something steadying about it, frankly. So many former child actors spend their adult years trying to win the spotlight back. Staci Keanan took all that early composure, the poise the camera loved on a teenager, and pointed it at something that carries real weight. She teaches law now. She works as an LA deputy district attorney. And the applause, if there is any, comes from a very different kind of room.
