Today we’d like to introduce you to Alice Victoria Winslow.
Alice, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I studied acting and writing at Brown (worked with playwright Paula Vogel there), then moved to New York to start an experimental theater company, then moved to London to get my Masters in Acting at The Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and then moved to Los Angeles because I don’t know why! And here I am!
Acting and writing have always worked in tandem for me; I’m probably at my best when I’m working both of those muscles in some capacity.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Moving to Los Angeles after London was one of the hardest transitions of my life. Drama school was such a deeply rewarding and transformative experience. I felt at the height of my creative powers, and the luxury of working on my craft all day every day was a joy I had never known before. I cockily thought that’s how my life would look from there on out.
To come from there to Los Angeles– a city I didn’t know, where nobody particularly cared where I had trained, and where I had all of two friends…that was rough. Looking back I’m shocked by how blindly confident I was buying that one-way ticket.
I’ve had to carve out my own path a bit and get used to creating on my own when (for the first time in my life, really) I didn’t have people to create with. I realized about one year into living in LA that it was the longest time I’d gone without being in a play since I was nine. That pain, the pain of not creating, is real. It hurts. But it’s forced me to get to know my own voice a little more, which has been as confusing and frustrating as it has been exhilarating.
Alright – so let’s talk about your work. What else should we know?
I’m an actor and a writer. I recently won an Independent Shorts Best Actress Award for Glaciers, in which I play someone recovering from ovarian cancer, and I played a conscientiously-objecting vampire in Black Cat in a Dark Room. And I just finished playing Rose Byrne in the play I’m Jennifer Mother F*cking Lawrence by Cole Quirk in the Hollywood Fringe.
On the writing side, I just turned in my first feature script, a take on Jane Austen’s Persuasion which I co-wrote with Ron Bass for Andrew Lazar and Christina Weiss Lurie. And I have a short that I wrote and star in, #BlueBoar, about the Salem witch trials. That’s being edited now and should (finally) be done soon.
In 2016 I spent a year working on a series of short video-essays called Head Shot. I made one video a week for a year as a way to enforce a creative commitment on myself at a time when I had very little else to ground me. I learned a lot from that experience. I’m still quite proud of some of them. And, as tends to be the case with weird things you do because you don’t know what else to do, that project ended up being the thing that brought a lot of friends, collaborators and creative work into my life. And it made LA start to feel like home. You can see them here: https://www.avwheadshot.com.
What has been the proudest moment of your career so far?
I don’t think my proudest moments would mean anything to other people. They are all internal. There are those moments as an actor when you are so completely absorbed that it genuinely feels like you are gone and something else is coming through you—a voice or a feeling or a movement surprises you because it is so completely not your own, and the whole world cracks open.
I have a handful of these moments, and they are so precious to me. I’m always chasing more of them. It happens to me while writing as well, I’m gone, and words are just pouring out of me from some other place.
I used to think that once I became a “good enough” artist, the process of creating would just constantly feel like that…being an open channel. But now I think maybe we only get glimpses of that feeling here and there. Little prizes along the path keeps us coming back even when making stuff feels boring or painful.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.avwheadshot.com
Image Credit:
Dana Patrick
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