I Became a Casting Director, because...

I love auditions. Maybe that’s silly. They can be grueling. Long hours, long days, tedious work. Actors with hopes and dreams of landing the role. Nervous. Confident. Unprepared. Over-coached.

Each is interesting and I find myself caring about the actors’ feelings in this process. I’m rooting for you. I want you to succeed. I want you to get it right and “nail it!”

I started performing in middle school participating in class plays and continued through high school, with drama, dance, and community theater. At the age of 18, I had the opportunity to direct children in a Shakespeare production in my small hometown. This was the start of my real journey of telling people what to do: directing. I discovered I could get actors to do their performances better. I was successful at it.

I continued finding opportunities to perform, yet there was a pivotal moment when in rehearsal for Cinderella in the title role, I jumped in and told another actress what to do. The director was a close friend of my mother’s and a tall beautiful black woman with an amazonian bone structure and imposing features. She turned to me pointing her long finger and said firmly: “Don’t direct!”

You see, my role in that production was as an actor. Yet with my frustration of watching another actor miss her mark, I’d piped up and gave my opinion. Not once, but multiple times! So I had it coming.

It taught me something about myself: I liked telling actors what to do. I went on to college, got married, had kids… got divorced. My ex-husband had worked in visual effects for film and TV and in the time that we were together, I’d learned and worked the FX business as a priority over acting. Believing this made me knowledgeable in the film industry, a friend asked me to mentor her (then) teenage son and encourage him to attend film school. So, I promised her son that if he went to film school and studied to be a director, I’d produce his theses project.

A few years went by, and he took me up on my promise. I rose to the occasion despite no formal training as a producer I figured it out and fumbled my way through this promise. I co-produced a short film called “Room 27” that successfully went to festivals and won a handful of awards.

I was heading toward a career as a producer when the director and I collaborated again on the next project: the music video, UNITED.

After this, we were to film 30 public service announcements — one for each of the articles of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights; involving a partnership with another film company. I jumped at the chance to let someone else produce, so I could focus on casting. And this further led to more projects.

The journey wasn’t straight, but once I got there, I found I love what I do!