The thread.

I was one of those awkward teenagers who found a kind of salvation in the theatre.

That sentence is from an interview a long time ago, and it is still the truest thing I can say about the beginning. High school theatre, then college, then Shakespeare, then seven years of training before anyone paid me to act. When the work came it came all at once: a Lifetime movie, a Super Bowl commercial, national campaigns, guest spots. I learned what a set feels like at five in the morning and what an audience feels like when they are with you.

Somewhere in there Matthew and I opened a small acting studio in North Phoenix. That was 2007. We thought we were teaching technique. What people actually came for was the room: a place where you could be terrible on Tuesday and better on Thursday and nobody would leave. The studio grew into a casting company, a Friday-night improv show, a summer movie camp. I am in the founding story of all of it, and I still teach there.

Five children arrived. We homeschool them, which is its own daily performance with a very honest audience. Teaching them to sing, I noticed what I had always noticed in acting class: children can hear far more than they can name. If you hand them the vocabulary first, they stop listening and start performing the vocabulary. If you let them hear it first, they never forget it.

That became Sounds of Home: a choir curriculum where every musical world has a place of rest, and Do is Home. It is the most personal thing I have made, and it is built on the same conviction as everything else here. A room of people making one sound together is a kind of repair. My faith tells me why. Psalm 100 is on the cover for a reason.

So, in order: faith, family, and then the work. Actress, teacher, founder. The thread is listening, and the people in the room.

Inspiring artists to find and live their purpose.Leeann's own line, from her Instagram