For me, the love of performing and the arts came when I needed it most. I remember looking out the car window and wishing I could move. To walk again. When I was twelve, I could not walk for a year and had to navigate the world as a person in a wheelchair. It was an incredibly lonely and isolating time period, but what kept me going was the arts. I would watch movies every hour of the day in my hospital bed. I discovered the joy of watching staged shows on my computer. When I could not leave the living room without help, TV shows would be my company, confidante, and friend. I fell in love with performing because of its superhuman nature to provide empathy and love in a world that can be so divided and overwhelming. To me, acting is the ultimate form of empathy. Being able to tell all kinds of stories and to showcase the lives of different people is an incredible gift that performers get to give. I want to be an actor so that I can give that gift to the people who need it. Through starting performing, I have been able to share the love of the arts with those who desire to escape their current circumstances, and be unified through diverse stories; an act that feels revolutionary in a world that seems to be continually more divided. I plan to make a career of performance after I graduate, through the creation of my own work to perform in. As an artist, I’m not satisfied with just sharing the words of someone else; I want to perform and write the stories that I believe deserve to be told. In the last year, I have written a full-length play, 7 short films, and a pilot. By writing my own films and roles, I learned I could create the roles I had always desired to play. In most acting shows, women are often secondary to a male character. I aim to break that by writing female characters with substance and nuance. Through performing and creating, I have written roles that go beyond the "girlfriend" trope and expand the autonomy of female characters in their own stories. The creation and expansion of depth in the roles is how I want to continue performing after I'm out of school. Since I have started performing, I have been privileged to perform in a variety of shows. The deepest honor of my life was playing Romaine Patterson in The Laramie Project and meeting Matthew Shepard's family over Zoom. Through being allowed to be a part of the piece and have conversations about the incident and the love within the show, I was able to grow as a person, and my perspective of the world was able to expand for the better. The beauty of theater is the diverse stories we can tell, and how they can change our understanding of human connection through the art of changing our worldview. This is why my dream role isn’t just a single role. It's the ability to play characters that spark change and serve a purpose that matters to the writers and directors developing them. The future is the stories that deserve to be told and are hard to tell. Through helping bring new avant-garde work to life, I am actively chasing what matters most to me about performing. While the arts matter to me beyond the scope of words, I was inspired to act through a nonprofit called Cafeteria Kids. Anyone can make art, but many opportunities to work on creative projects when you're a developing artist require spending money. Kids without the resources to afford training immediately are put at a disadvantage. No one in my family could afford acting classes, and the issues with my mobility consumed my parents, so my creative dreams went unnoticed until much later in adolescence. That's where Cafeteria Kids came in. This remarkable woman-owned theatre company allowed all kids to shine. The owners, Aimee and Olivia, wanted kids like me to find themselves and develop their confidence, with financial support for all. It was a safe space, and under their guidance, I was able to become who I am today. Through this scholarship, I would be able to pursue my love of performing. Through creating my own projects while balancing the cost of art school tuition and living expenses, I have found it hard to keep up financially. My family is struggling to support me, and even with a job, it's hard to make enough to live. Storytelling has never been more important than now, and I want to continue to be a part of the voices of tomorrow. With this scholarship, that would continue to be possible for me.