Timeline
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Born!
My home was never my mailing address. “Home” to me was downtown Chicago where I spent half of every week, or Urbana, Illinois, where my great aunt and uncle lived. They were like my grandparents. My great uncle from Kansas blasted CMT, America’s country music equivalent to MTV. My great aunt he married from Okinawa, Japan introduced me to Hayao Miyazaki. Being with my great aunt and uncle always felt special because I got to be immersed in old world Midwestern culture and Japanese culture in the same moment. Maybe “home” was St. Louis or Kansas City, where after Illinois, I spent the most time, every so often seeing tornadoes form on their own. The artwork and short stories I wrote for schoolwork were always about Midwestern culture and very often, tornadoes. I wondered why movies never portrayed Midwestern culture honestly. Grown up me is all about blending Midwestern stories with global culture in cinema. I loved learning about Abraham Lincoln, women of the grassland prairies who were settlers and Native Americans, the people of early Chicago, Al Capone and his gangsters and the good/bad hybrid of American history. Everyday women inspired me as the hidden voices of Midwestern life who will never be in history books but are part of Midwestern culture.
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Becoming Me
7 year old me loved Disney movies I could sing along to, black and white old films, action movies starring the coolest women ever like anything with Sandra Bullock and the Terminator series, Jim Carrey comedies and standard youth fare of the times airing on Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network. My first orchestral concert was when my class took a field trip to have a private concert of The Lion King’s film score. I loved Janet Jackson, Sheryl Crow and all kinds of music. People thought it was ridiculous when I got a Bangles cassette tape at the mall. Finding joy of all of this was the first glimpse of the real me. Age 7 going on 8 was the last time my real hair was shown to the world. I got really into hair dye, swapping dark brunette to blonde and back, for a long time into young adulthood. My tiny self experimented with makeup well into my teen years. With magazines or ideas in my head from movies I’d watched, I would try things out with free makeup nice mall saleswomen gave me from seasonal kits their bosses told them to throw in the trash. My interest in makeup, wardrobe and the craft of special effects was always there. Music. Movies. Phrasing this into “I want to do this for a living” wasn’t something I knew how to express, but I knew what I loved.
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Music Studies
I began with flute at school and once weekly studying private flute lessons after switching from the clarinet. At age 11 when I was in St. Louis dropping by a Borders, I got sheet music and saw how easy it was for me to pop my tunes onto it. Nowadays, I do it via computer, easier and faster! Starting when I was 12, my hobby was creating beats on my laptop like whatever was popular on the radio or singing over hit songs. Performing marching band music for school homework bored me. I loved extra credit music class assignments and any of the many times we had film scores on our homework. I loved film score composers and hip hop stars, pop stars and hot music producers of the times all on TRL. In the Midwest before social media, it felt hard to believe you could grow up to work in entertainment. People in the modern day Midwest were bankers, doctors, lawyers and corporate people when they were successful. I wanted to be like old Midwestern $ucce$$ stories up there with Walt Disney and Henry Ford, doing amazing things.
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Tales Old As Time
Some roles are meant to be written by yourself. When I was 14, the weekend after watching the first "Lord of the Rings" film theatrically, I wrote my own version of "The Time Machine." I would score it, star in it, write it and direct it. Today, grown up me is making this happen one day at a time with my own remake of the H.G. wells classic story. When I finished my homework at school, in class I worked on film ideas my adult self would make. When I was 13, I pithced my math teacher a Matrix meets Alice in Wonderland parody when he assigned matrices homework. My first teen film idea coming to fruition was The Homework’s Revenge: Esther in Wonderland. Get ready for more as my IMDb credits soar.
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NYC
How many bites out of the Big Apple can you take when you have diabetes? Be careful! Just kidding. I loved taking many bites. My family and I began going to Manhattan between noraml life when I was 14 years old. This had an effect on me because the minute I got there, I curiously walked into an event where I met my first major fashion designer! In a very Mean Girls moment, he told me I was pretty and wanted to know if I was an actress. I began being face to face with young people not much older than I was whose careers I wished I had. That self pressure of “Hey, loser! Why isn’t this your life?” was what I needed. The myth of unfriendly New Yorkers is false in my experience. In my teens and my 20’s, I collected real life stories from WWII veterans, everyday New Yorkers and so many friendly folks who never once doubted me when I said I wanted to use them to write my future movies about American classism as told in animation, action movies and beyond! Restauranteurs and small business owners all getting to know me felt like Leave It to Beaver. The museums are awesome. I don’t need to drive! Can you tell I love Manhattan? Experiencing the city for short bursts and sometimes being a resident on/off is a fantastic way to spend your life. Someday, I hope to film a movie at The New York Palace hotel, a place of escapism for me.
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Hook 'Em Horns
Nobody can ever trade high school gossip about me because my high school was done online and in the mail. I graduated early from high school and community college when I was 16, heading to the University of Texas at Austin. I did graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in 2007, but really, the great film ideas kept on coming in the middle of class. You know I wrote them down. Between classes, I hung out with fellow students who felt like they would’ve rather been in a Nashville songwriters’ lab. We immersed ourselves in music chats and trying stuff on our instruments. From age 13 up to my university graduation, everyone acted cruelly about my pursuing an entertainment career. No, I had to go be a journalist or some real world profession because anything show BUSINESS isn’t a real job, right?
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My 20's Were Awful
The paper version of “young lady graduates at 19 and moves away where she gets freelance journalism assignments as she works as a New York agency model” sounds amazing. Reality: I hopped from agency to agency not being given enough work as a model because I morally disagreed with things pre-#metoo. I wrote for the most famous publications around the world under pen names and sometimes Nicole, but not frequently enough to earn a living. My diabetes worsened around age 22 where I would get surprised with that headache and nausea combo and sometimes, temporary blindness that wouldn’t come off. I felt miserable. Things didn’t improve with my diabetes until the middle of 2016.
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FX Learning
From 2018 to 2022, I took distance classes from Stan Winston School. The pathways I completed were Design Basics, Design, Filmmaking, Hair Work, Puppet Making Basics, Puppet Making, Painting Basics, Painting, Mechanical and Animatronic FX Basics. It was one of the best decisions of my life. Here I was going right into training my brain to be visually artistic and knowing about the daily work on blockbuster filmmaking left out of film school. Film school prepares you for filming techniques. Stan Winston School FX classes teach you what to do on the job in the real world.
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Removing the Mask
This is the actual me. As a model, and eerily as a freelance journalist where your appearance should not matter, people wanted me to look like everyone else, like that famous Twilight Zone episode, “Number 12 Looks Just Like You.” The problem: none of those stereotypes looked like I do. Use self tanner and this darker brown pencil. “I want you to have brown hair.” Black hair. No, blonde hair. Makeup that didn’t go with me. Photoshop not to make me a better version of myself and clean up lighting, no, to give me that Twilight Zone “transformation.” Freeing myself to have auburn hair, paleness, makeup I feel great in, clothes that reflect me, is all part of the package of growing as a filmmaker and actress. The world started getting to see the real me around 2018, and fully by 2022, as old habits are hard to break.
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The Summer Time Froze
In June 2022, my laptop broke. How was I going to finish my final self animated feature film, The Eyes of Old Texas? Work on my music? Work on my screenplay for The Big Bad Wolf Strikes It Rich!, my goal of making it a motion capture animated film? In the month that I waited for my new computer, I hadn’t had time off since the summer of 2007 when I graduated from UT Austin. Then, something mysterious and awesome happened to me right out of the pages of The Artist’s Way, a book I highly recommend for all entertainment professionals. I suddenly knew without any reason: 1) I was besides a great composer definitely meant to be an actress as my secondary calling and 2) I had to stop working on Big Bad Wolf because I am meant to remake The Time Machine as my first huge film. I am working on the necessary steps for me to get there, with films I need to make so this happens. The first really challenged my inner beliefs. Me, really? I decided to follow it. Oprah Winfrey and many call these moments “God’s whipsers.” You might talk about manifesting, the Universe or science. I believe in following the White Rabbit like Alice in Wonderland, and thus, I am now putting my entire being into this project with love! Reworking your 14 year old self’s dream movie is an exciting thing.
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Poisonous
My dream roles include playing Poison Ivy in my own live action film series. I love action movies and satire. Unexpectedly, I fell in love with comedy when making my indie film, Pandemic Breakdown, in a Long Island accent. I welcome it all. Drama. Accents. Bring it on.