Brianne Beatrice

I attribute my success to my mother and the way that I was raised. I was raised with so much love, and it wasn't about aesthetics or being pretty. It was about being a beautiful soul, loving other people, caring about other people, putting people ahead of yourself, and being selfless. But my mother also ingrained in me the importance of believing in myself at the same time. She would always say, you know, don't ever be conceited, you're not better than anybody else, but you are special. You are a special person. When this repetition is said to you so many times growing up, you believe that. My mother died when I was 23 or 24, and I don't let anybody take that from me, ever. Take what she gave to me, because she was this beautiful, bright light in a room. She was someone who would give the shirt off her back for anybody. She loved people, she loved life, she took care of anybody that needed help. Watching her be that type of person made me want to carry on her light.

The best advice I ever received came from a casting agent, director, or artistic producer at the Purple Rose Theater in Michigan many years ago during an auditioning tour. I was in a group, and he asked us, do you want to get ahead? Do you want to be an artist? Do you want to live your life's dream? When we said yes, he said, here's my advice: Show up. You can't be an actor sitting in your house watching movies. You've got to get up, you've got to get to the movie theater. You've got to get up, you've got to go to the auditions. You've got to move to a place where they're auditioning. You've got to put yourself out there. I had so many years of auditioning, doing 100 auditions over a couple years, sometimes six or seven a day, bouncing around to theaters in Boston. But I always had that man's voice in the back of my head saying, you want to get ahead? You gotta show up. So when I'm tired and I have to go to an audition, when I'm tired and I have to do an interview, when I'm not in the mood and I just want to Netflix and chill, I remember him and I go, okay, get up, curl your hair, put on a cute outfit, grab your headshot and resume, let's go. You gotta show up, you gotta put yourself out there.

Do the research. Whatever that might be, whether it's you want to be doing independent films, or you want to be creating your own content, or you want to be on stage, do the research. Figure out what are the websites, who are the people, who are the big players. If you want to be an actor or performer, go see the shows, find out who's directing them, ask if you can go backstage. Networking is a huge part of it too, getting yourself out there. When you want to be really successful at something, at anything, you have to become an expert at it. At the moment of commitment, the universe conspires to assist you. When you really commit and believe in yourself, then all of these pieces of the puzzle will start to come to fruition. But you've got to do the research, you've got to know the players. Get the training, look up the schools, figure out what's a great fit for you, what can you afford, how can you transfer. I talk to my students about this all the time: you're gonna do a couple years with me, and then I'm gonna get you somewhere else where you're gonna have opportunities to train and learn from other schools and other people. Trust yourself, believe in yourself. There's enough at the top for everybody. Don't judge, don't critique, don't compare. Why do you have to be like somebody else when you are you? You're authentically you, so be authentically you. Allow yourself the opportunity to meet the right people who will believe in you. All it takes is honestly one person to believe in you to get your dream to start soaring.

I think the world is in a really dark place right now, and I feel that especially in our country, we're really divided as people. I think we want to, I hope, live in a world where everybody has the opportunity to live the way that they want to live. I like to make art that invites people to be uncomfortable in what they're seeing, in what is going on, where there is injustice. The challenge is going, okay, I know I'm gonna produce this play, and people are gonna maybe walk out. Or people are gonna love it and have an aha moment at home. And other people are gonna say, I can't handle this, this isn't for me. Allowing the art to educate people that don't know about queer issues, or don't understand about the lack of equity in certain areas of the country, I think that the biggest challenge is bringing that to the stage and saying, okay, well, we all might be loved or disliked for other people's discomfort, but we're gonna keep doing it anyway. The biggest opportunity in my field is making art that invites people to be uncomfortable in what they're seeing. I'm very lucky to be supported by my institution, and our president has a PhD in theater, so he's really supportive of the work that we're doing. It really shines such a bright light on these students in our community because we are a Hispanic serving institution.

Being professional is incredibly important to me. Time management is also a huge value because it represents that your time, whoever that might be, is as important as my time. I'm obsessed with that. Again, I keep going back to this idea of believing in yourself. There's also this phrase that might seem kind of bizarre, but it's called getting up off of yourself. That's doing the work. I teach in my workshops about how to do the work. If you didn't have mom or dad at home being your cheerleader, how do you do that work as an adult? What if mom, dad, your cousin, your friends gave you the opposite? Now we're all adults and we're responsible to get rid of those doubts. You've got to do the work on you first. This is called internal to external. You do the internal work on yourself first, and then once you feel that way, the sky's the limit. You can stand on stage in front of people and talk about the things that are really important and not focus on the shirt you wore today. That's getting up off of yourself, not making this presentation about me, but making it about who's listening to it. Getting off of myself and really focusing on how to influence other people. I think that really is the gateway to success.