Sarah Osburn Brady
Art Form(s):Artist Statement
The arts expand the imaginations and therefore the possibilities of those who encounter and participate in them. While this is true for all art forms, theater arts in general and storytelling in particular have a distinctive ability: they invite children to become participants in a story through their imaginations, thus empowering them to mentally walk in the shoes of characters, factual and fictional. Each story I tell, whether historical, literary, traditional, personal, or some interweaving of multiple genres, teaches children content, empathy, and more in a way that is faithful to the art form while engaging the whole person.
Artist Bio
Sarah Brady is an actress, storyteller, teaching artist, and writer whose backgrounds in theatre and education influence her storytelling. She taught communication and theatre at multiple universities before making her way toward solo performance and then into the storytelling world. She has told stories in the US and UK, where she lived for three years soaking in stories as her roots grew deep in British soil.
Sarah’s telling spans genres of historical, traditional, literary, and personal tales, while her awards include being chosen the Sunburst Performing Artist of the Year from Arts for Learning Virginia; selected as best liar of the Cambridge Storytellers Liars Contest; and being part of a team that received a Pete Taylor Partnership of Excellence Award from the Military Child Education Coalition for work with the DODEA Lakenheath Complex Schools and Suffolk County Councils Archives that culminated in an exhibition telling the stories of third-culture kids living in Suffolk, England, “‘I have three homes’: Life as an American military child in Suffolk.”
She has told at a variety of festivals, including appearing at the 50th Annual National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee, as a New Voice Featured Teller, and has worked with such entities as Story Tapestries; Arts for Learning–Virginia; Cambridge Storytellers; Epic Tales; the Suffolk Archives; the White Rose Project; and the International Storytelling Center. Passionate about stories that help us see each other and the world around us, Sarah specializes in finding the heart of each story she tells.
