I grew up in the small town of Fort Frances, Ontario, Canada. I spent most of my childhood on a boat with my father cruising Rainy Lake and nourishing a creative heart.

My mother once told me that my first day school was also the first day my brothers were off to university. A very weird moment for a mother I imagine. My brothers are 16 years older then I am, so I didn’t have too much sibling rivalry, or too much company as I grew up.  All that time alone created a vivid imagination which I mapped out with pencils and markers. I was drawing before I ever wrote a letter thanks to my Auntie, who introduced me to drawing pretty ladies in dresses.

When it was my turn to be off to University.  I choose to take theatre at York University in North York, Ontario. I went through the rigorous auditioning process and luckily out of a thousand others, I was accepted. I moved seventeen hours away from my sleepy little town to a big city ( North York is just outside Toronto, Ontario). Unfortunately, I spent only one year at York University because I never made it through the second year audition process. In the first year there was around 200 students in the Theatre program. Second year, out of those 200, they accepted only 16. The odds were stacked against me. It was a tough time. Coinciding with the rejection from York, a very dear friend of mine passed away. It was my first experience with death and I didn’t deal with it very well. I think I laid in bed for a month. Broken hearted and disenchanted, I decided not to return to York and made the move west to another big city; Vancouver, British Columbia.

I studied at a private acting academy called the Vancouver Academy of Dramatic Art. I was still disparately trying to chase my dream of becoming an actor. Throughout this course I began to realize how difficult being an actor would be for me. I remember one exercise where I was asked to memorize a monologue of my choice. I am an ambitious person, and I trully love to torture myself with challenges, so I picked a difficult monologue from Marsha Norman‘s ‘Night, Mother. The premise of the play is Jessie, the character I was playing, was living and taking care of her elderly mother. She suffered from epilepsy but hadn’t had a episode in a while, which meant one was coming. Her mother was too weak to aid Jessie if  she suffered another episode, so Jessie decided , after a pleasant night with her Mother, she was going to take her own life. The monologue was from the part in the play when Jessie is explaining why she was going to take her own life. The monologue has emotionally depth that required genuine and sincere work as an actor. I did my homework, memorized and preformed it for the class. My instructor said it was good, but I need to add some ‘real’ emotions to it to make it perfect, so he wanted to do an exercise with me. The exercise was this; he asked me if I had ever lost someone. I replied yes just a few months before this. He told me to say everything I never I got said to my lost loved ones right then and there in front of the class. Now acting classes don’t allow you to take a few minutes to think about  what to say or allow you to gain some composure, so I began saying everything. About 2 sentences in I was bawling my eyes out, snot running down my face, babbling. My instructor said “Go, you’re there, start the monologue again!” Of course I did, but I forgot most of my blocking, most of my words and I recited the monologue laying down on the prop couch with my face in a pillow, sobbing. The class said it was great, but I realized I couldn’t shake the grief I conjured in order to make the role real. I figured out what it takes to be a “good” actor and how emotionally giving you have to be and I realized, this work is not for me! So I graduated from V.A.D.A., and instead of auditioning, finding an agent and shmoozing in the biz, I went to work in a kitchen for a year at a restaurant called The Cellar Jazz.

During this time of working for minimum wage, I began writing, drawing, and painting in order to fulfill the creative void left by abandoning acting. My father always told me I should apply to the Emily Carr University for Visual Art, because I have always been an artist, but like the stubborn child I am, I had to figure this out my own way. Eventually I came to this conclusion on my own. I scrambled together a portfolio, submitted it and hoped for the best. Four years later, here I am, with  B.F.A in Visual Art and beginning my career as a Visual Artist.

I am returning to my home town to become Director and Curator of the Little Beaver Cultural Centre with my partner. There, I intend to share my newly obtained knowledge of contemporary art and explore the creativity in the community of Fort Frances. Oh, and get a big hairy Newfoundland dog.