About Me

When I was a little girl I knew I wanted to be a performer. At 9 years old I went to my father and said, “I want to be an actress”. He was so excited and immediately signed me up at the Actor’s Center in Philadelphia run by Rodney and Edie Robb. I fell in love. We had an on camera class, voiceover, improv, theatre acting, musical theater, stage combat, and movement classes. I would go every Saturday for 4 hours and it was the best 4 hours of my week. We would have two classes a week and it wouldn’t matter what they were because I loved it all. I have so many fond memories and forever friends from the Actor’s Center. It is where I found my voice.

I fell in love with performing because I loved the rush of being onstage. To hear the applause at the end of the performance and know that people liked what I did was the most amazing feeling. As I aged I realized that it wasn’t just the fact that people were clapping for me that made me love performing, it’s that I loved making people feel things. I loved having the opportunity to make an entire room of people feel something. That human connection we all strive for, I would have that with an entire auditorium filled with people.

The craft of acting was something I started to admire when I was about 12 years old. I remember being in an acting class at the Actor’s Center with my teacher, Sandra Turner. She was trying to make me get to a point where I was sad in the scene and being 12 I hadn’t really gone through very much in my life to tap into the sadness of loss. So we did an exercise where she told me to speak to someone in my family who had passed away as if they were sitting right in front of me. I had lost my great-grandmother, Bubby Eve, recently after her battle with dementia and I was fairly close to her. We did the exercise and just from speaking to this empty chair, I started bawling. Once I got to that point where I was rooted in those emotions she said ok get up and read the lines. It was in that moment that I realized acting is f*cking hard! Acting pushes us to tap into the most vulnerable parts of ourselves and stay in that place to perform another character’s hardships. It makes us more empathetic and compassionate people.

Pace University was where I was finally able to bring out all my creative energy. Before I went to Pace I always thought of myself as just an actor. Give me a script and I’ll do it but don’t ask me to write or offer any creative ideas. I went to Pace for BA acting in the International Performance Ensemble and honestly, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. This was a devised theater program where we made our own shows, as a collective, from the ground up with nothing pre-written. I was terrified but it taught me to get out of my comfort zone and not be afraid of failure, for failure is simply the building blocks to success. I found my creative voice and tapped into an imagination I never thought I had. I find myself using these tools even when I’m on set filming something scripted and tapping into this new-found imagination to create a beautiful character rooted in truth.

The Story of Pop

My father and I were very close. He was an actor and I could tell that was his true passion. He told me a story about how he threw away his big break. He was offered a role on Seinfeld as one of Elaine’s love interests but he would have had to move to LA. He decided to turn it down so he could stay in Philadelphia to take care of my brother. That’s when he began to focus solely on his law career. He had his own personal injury law practice and did some acting on the side while my sister and I were young. Eventually he just stopped acting altogether to practice law. He would always tell me how he wanted to get back into it, maybe do some extra work and apply for things here and there but he never did.

Unfortunately, he was never able to re-pursue his dream because he lost his battle to Leukemia on November 9th, 2016 at the age of 61. Most people may remember that day at the day Trump was elected president, well it was so much more than that for me. I woke up in a panic at 4am to find that out, and thought to myself, why is my father, the best man in the world, lying on his death bed in a disgusting hospital when this joke of a human being gets to be the president of the United States? I was devastated and my dad would have been too. That afternoon my father was gone. My confidant, my manager, my best friend, my one and only, Dad, sick and gone in a matter of two weeks. I knew from that day on that it was my responsibility to live in his legacy. I want to achieve what he never had the chance to achieve. I was 20 years old at the time and this was my first big loss. I was in the middle of my college career with no idea how I was going to get through without my dad. I pushed through and graduated for him. I dedicate every performance to him. I truly wish to live in his legacy. The first year after he passed I was watching the Oscars which I don’t do very often because I think it’s a bit silly but to each their own. Something I don’t find silly about the Oscars, though, is the in memoriam. While the Oscars were honoring all the famous people who had passed away that year I started to cry because I realized that my dad never had his chance to make it up there. It was in that moment that I knew I would have a successful acting career. Not necessarily make it to the Oscars, that’s not my goal, but to be recognized for my work and the contribution I make to the artistic community, all done in his memory. I love you, Pop.