Alumni Profile: Gena Sims & the Autism Theater Project

November 2, 2022
By Shannon Musgrave 

For Gena Sims (BFA-Music Theater, 2019), coaching at Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama was about greater than discovering her personal voice; it was an integral a part of her life’s work to assist and help younger individuals with autism to find their voices. 

Sims grew up in Miami, FL, the place she has helped increase her youthful sister who’s autistic. From a younger age, Sims was drawn to the humanities, and particularly the theater. She remembers being in a play in center college and experiencing the sensation of an viewers actually understanding the sophisticated character she was portraying. That connection to the human expertise and the need to open hearts and minds by means of creative expression continues to drive Sims’s work to this present day.

She based the Autism Theater Project the summer season earlier than her senior 12 months of highschool. What began as group drama courses tailor-made to fulfill the wants of younger individuals with autism, has grown right into a non-profit training and manufacturing firm whose mission is to point out the world that everybody has a voice. 

The instructional part of the Autism Theater Project is rooted in serving to younger individuals with autism discover their feelings and put phrases to what they’re feeling. Through workout routines like animal work, focus and power video games, and situation position enjoying, Sims helps college students join their feelings to a reputation and an motion, and teaches them how their very own actions can influence others’ feelings. 

The manufacturing aspect of the Autism Theater Project got here into focus after Sims attended the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama as a music theater main. Sims discovered a mentor in professor Barbara Mackenzie-Wood, who additionally has a sibling with autism. Sims stated Mackenzie-Wood’s ardour for instructing appearing is rooted in her need to assist college students specific themselves; one thing Sims profoundly understood. During her sophomore 12 months, with the steering of Mackenzie-Wood, Sims devised a play as a part of the School of Drama’s annual Playground Festival – a weeklong exploration of student-initiated and student-directed work. The play, “In the Life of a Child,” was impressed by Sims’s sister. It explores the lifetime of a younger lady with autism who finds a magical world the place her schoolmates are capable of hear the voice inside her head. After performing it at CMU in 2016, Sims took the play to Miami in 2018, the place it was produced by the Autism Theater Project at Actors’ Playhouse and Miami Children’s Theater.

Since graduating from Carnegie Mellon in 2019, Sims has continued to increase the work of the Autism Theater Project. During the pandemic, Sims homeschooled her now teenaged sister – an expertise that she calls “life-changing.” She felt an excellent stronger name to develop instruments and sources to assist disabled teenagers efficiently transition into maturity. The latest initiative of the Autism Theater Project is an online sequence referred to as “The Voice Inside,” which tells actual tales about teenagers overcoming challenges of their lives, from their very own views. Sims is working with skilled autistic playwrights to put in writing “The Voice Inside,” and is growing it by means of Zoom workshops and rehearsals with autistic actors. She hopes the sequence will attain teenagers, dad and mom, and academics and encourage them to look past an individual’s challenges to see their true potential. 

“I want people with disabilities to feel like they can look at a video or something in the media and feel like their story is being represented,” stated Sims.

Learn extra concerning the Autism Theater Project and donate to help “The Voice Inside” at autism theater undertaking.org. For extra data, contact Gena: gena@autismtheaterproject.org.