Maria Burnham, Co-Artistic Director, Ensemble Member
Maria Burnham, right, as Beatrice the Weimaraner in Ghostlight’s live movie reading of Best In Show.
"Theatre and acting had been a part of my life in some way since elementary school, becoming more so once I went to a performing arts magnet high school and then studied theatre (and English AND journalism) in college. My attraction to the arts was always a sense of bafflement to my working-class family that excelled in technical skills and mathematics, but had never seen a play until I came along. Maybe it baffled me too. Who can say? All I knew was it was a way to lose myself in new worlds and adventures. It let me leave behind the boredom of a solitary childhood spent living where my parents worked with empty boxes as my playground and a chicken as a pet.
"It wouldn’t be until after college that I would discover that my mom too had used the arts to escape the horrors of a childhood marked by war, extreme poverty and a donkey as a pet. She used dance and later a film career to leave behind her village life for good. The revelation that acting was a hereditary trait, that there was this entire history of myself that I didn't know, was unsettling. But it was also comforting. Theatre connects me to my family history in a way that old photos do not. That I could literally be the same person that my mother had been by taking on a role, that we both understood what it meant to create new people and new worlds, that acting had led my mother to be in Athens when my father was in Athens resulting in my actual existence? Well, now, that's something that no other career could ever give me."