Leigha Horton - Stage, Screen, and Voice Actress - Minneapolis, MN

Biography

Ah, the bio. The bane of nearly every actor's existence. How does one sound professional and give significant career accomplishments their adequate due without sounding like a raging egotist? Write it in third-person! Why yes, that's it! Make it sound like someone else is incredibly impressed and thinks you're fantastic. Meanwhile, be secretly, deeply grateful that one has been lucky enough to work in one's chosen field on such immensely satisfying projects with such immensely talented people. And make sure it's not boring. Without further ado:

Leigha Horton is a stage, screen, and voice-over actress residing in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and a member of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the American Federation of Radio and Television Artists (AFTRA). Her dedication to performing was evident from a young age: from dancing to Glen Miller albums on a lakeside dock at age three; to narrating the staged version of Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree in kindergarten (and the tree was happy); to recording improvised, multi-character, catastrophic radio plays on her two-tone-brown Fisher-Price tape recorder at age seven. Her Barbie Dolls could hardly keep up with the hours and hours of knock-down, drag-out, pre-teen dramas that would have given any telenovela screenwriter a decade's worth of plot-twists.

Uncanny empathy? Perhaps. Schizophrenia? The unicorn says no. But instead of having her committed in high school, Leigha's parents allowed her to channel her (whatever you've decided to call it) into something more useful, something more structured. Something called Acting Class. There she learned to walk around the building with a book on her head (no joke), how to kill at charades, and ultimately how to score text and say it out loud like she meant it. Lead roles and fancy awards from fancy institutions followed (California's Bank of America Award for Excellence in Dramatics, semi-finalist at The English-Speaking Union's twenty-third annual Shakespeare Competition), and Leigha was officially bitten.

She studied theater at the College of St. Catherine (now St. Catherine University), after realizing that she didn't really want to be an occupational therapist, she just wanted to play an occupational therapist, and The President, and a princess, and an astronaut. Her major officially switched, she played The Witch in Sondheim's Into the Woods, as well as the role of Queen Gertrude in Hamlet, and received honors from the Pi Epsilon Delta Honor Society for Theater, which, according to Google, doesn't seem to exist anymore. She swears she has a pin or something, somewhere, to prove it did exist at some point in time.

Since graduating, Leigha has served as the Executive Director of the Ministry of Cultural Warfare ("snarky" - MN Daily, "iconoclastic" - City Pages), co-producing all but the first of its shows. Prior to this, she served as co-producer and member of The Velvet Elvises improv-comedy team ("for our money the best local troupe working in the long-form improv style known as the Harold" - City Pages); as a writer/cast member of local television's Narcolepsy, Inc.; had featured guest appearances in The Scrimshaw Brothers' Look Ma, No Pants!; and just to keep people guessing, studied and performed Irish dance, spent several years studying Tae Kwon Do and Hap Ki Do (yes, she has broken boards with her hands), and danced with the American Lung Association in a Chargers vs. Raiders pre-game show in San Diego's Jack Murphy Stadium.

Favorite theater credits include the role of Ms. Ina Shaw in The Children's Theatre Company's Tale of a West-Texas Marsupial Girl; Nurse Evelyn Marsden in Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition (Science Museum of Minnesota); Hannah in Burned (Table Salt Productions), Sarah in See You Next Tuesday (Walking Shadow Theatre Company), Ralphie's Mom in A Christmas Story (St. Croix Festival Theater); the Ministry of Cultural Warfare's 2006 Minnesota Fringe Festival hit, The Unbearable Lightness of Being American, after performing the one-person version to critical acclaim at the 2004 Montreal Fringe; Feste as a drag-king in Twelfth Night (Theatre in the Round); Jean Muir in Behind a Mask (Hardcover Theater); the scores of new works she regularly stage-reads for The Playwrights' Center; and the live science demonstrations she gives at the Science Museum of Minnesota, amongst others.

Recent voice-overs and screen appearances include radio and television commercials and industrials for Cadillac (with Laurence Fishburne - yes, THAT Laurence Fishburne), Target, Microsoft, Lifetime Fitness, Marketplace Events (no, I still don't know what Ty Pennington smells like, much to the dismay of my teen sisters - it was just him and me on these radio and tv commercials, but were in separate studios, in separate states), Kansas Lottery, H&R Block, Nexxus, Caribou Coffee, Centex Homes, Walker Art Center, Home Depot, General Mills (Yoplait Yogurt, Progresso Soup, Big G Cereals, Old El Paso, Totino's Party Pizzas), Landscape Structures, Inc. in collaboration with American Forests' Global ReLeaf project, The National Marrow Donor Program, Kona Grill, University of Minnesota, and Ameriprise Financial.

Additional film and voice-over credits include Stephanie Yates in the award-winning feature film, The Monster of Phantom Lake (St. Euphoria Productions); Petra in the award-winning web-serial Chasing Windmills; Lorraine in Minnesota Public Radio's Minnesota Stories: The Winner; host of The Fresh Girl's Guide to Canning; The Voice of the Fringe (2005 Minnesota Fringe Podcast), host of Radio Hong Kong (Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy Podcast), as well as Open-Ended: The Art of Engagement and Dialog (Walker Art Center).

There. All done. For now. That wasn't so bad, was it? You deserve a cookie for making it through all that. But the thing is, see, it always changes. She's always doing something. So for the most up-to-date musings on Leigha's shenanigans on the stage, behind the mic, and in front of the camera, visit The Greenroom. Regularly. We'll see you there.