Early Life
I was born in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan and grew up singing Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables, and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat with my mom and sisters. I spent most of elementary school in Memphis, Tennessee and then moved back to Michigan. My first experience on stage, other than dance recitals, was in middle school when I had the opportunity to play the lead in our 8th grade play-Under the Big Top--where I had to fall in love with a circus clown. After that I was hooked! I participated in high school musicals and continued doing theatre when my family moved to Mexico City my sophomore year. Living internationally was an amazing opportunity--I absolutely loved traveling around the country with my family and learning Spanish.
College
In the fall of 2006 I headed off to Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. I got involved in lots of activities and clubs including the hip hop dance team and the very important Tall People Club. I originally planned on being a musical theatre major but several awesome life experiences brought me to the realization that I was always meant to be a teacher. I changed my major to theatre education and the rest was history! I was very involved in theatre and participated in productions in any way I could--acting, stage managing, designing, directing. I had a blast playing roles in shows my friends were directing, including Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors and Logainne Schwartzandgrubenierre in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Stage management became a major interest of mine. I stage managed Tartuffe and received a KCACTF nomination for that show. From that experience I got to represent BYU and compete in Los Angeles. Los Angeles was apparently calling to me, because I also applied for and got an internship with the renowned Cornerstone Theater Company and spent a month living in LA with their company and helping produce and stage manage their show about and with the residents of Pacoima. In 2009 I started a new adventure when I married Daniel Faulk--a tall, handsome geography major. Shockingly, we did not meet at the Tall People Club. I was also finding my place as a director in college, and my senior directing project--Next to Normal--won the Theatre and Media Arts Department's "Best Director" award. In 2011, after completing my student teaching at Hillcrest High School, I graduated Cum Laude from BYU.
Career
After graduating, I was a long-term drama and choir substitute at a middle school in Park City, UT. From there I got a job as a junior high theatre teacher at American Preparatory Academy in West Valley City. Park City and West Valley are very different socioeconomically, and these two teaching experiences taught me a LOT about working with students and families of all different backgrounds and helped me craft my own teaching style. An amazing opportunity presented itself that summer when I got to stage manage a show in New York at the New York City Musical Theatre Festival. My dream of working in NYC came true! It was during this job that I did a phone interview (literally in a crowded corner of the 42nd street subway station) with Kearns High School and was offered the theatre teacher position there. I started at Kearns with only 3 theatre classes and $400 in my theatre account. Within a few years I was teaching 7 classes with $30,000 in my account. I have worked incredibly hard to build the theatre program at Kearns and truly consider it my home. During all this craziness, Daniel and I had two boys and in 2018 we were set to have our first baby girl. We found out that our lives were going to take another turn--our daughter was diagnosed with spina bifida, and I had to leave school early to travel to San Francisco for fetal surgery. For the 2018-2019 school year, my school district offered me a sabbatical, and I spent that year taking care of my daughter and rocking the stay-at-home-mom life. In 2019 I resumed my position at Kearns High School. In addition to teaching, directing, and mothering, I have also continued my acting career and have spent the last 8 years performing at the Desert Star Playhouse in Murray, Utah. Comedy is my bread and butter, and my students love to come watch their teacher perform! I am very excited to see where my career will go next!