We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jennifer Vosters. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jennifer below.

Jennifer, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

My current project is hands-down the most meaningful project I’ve ever worked on: writing, performing, and producing SONGS WITHOUT WORDS, a solo play about 19th-century composer Felix Mendelssohn and his equally gifted elder sister, Fanny. I’d fallen in love with their music as a teenager in middle-school orchestra and felt for years that theirs was a story worth telling: two best friends and child prodigies, destined for greatness, except that Felix was allowed to pursue music professionally and Fanny was not. After years of mulling it over, the idea coalesced for one actor to play both siblings and thus really bring into sharp relief the main question of their lives: what happens to the same great talent when it is cultivated in one person (Felix) but suppressed in another (Fanny)?

I spent several years working very sporadically on the play before finally submitting the idea to a fringe festival to give myself a deadline. When it got accepted, I then asked some brilliant friends to direct and design the show. We premiered it at the Milwaukee Fringe Festival in 2023, and now I’m partway through a mini-tour of several North American cities including Cincinnati, Green Bay, Cleveland, and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Earlier this spring, the play won the M. Elizabeth Osborn New Play Award from the American Theatre Critics Association, which was a huge honor.

It has been a very integrating experience, drawing on so many different facets of what I love: writing, acting, music, history, sharing women’s stories, collaborating with dear friends, traveling to cool places. And it’s given me agency in a career that so often hinges on other people’s decisions. I felt like in doing this I got to choose myself, and choose something I loved and believed in, and choose to partner with people I trust and admire deeply. It’s been the biggest challenge of my life, and the payoff has already been really beautiful.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am a writer, actor, director, and musician from the Midwest (born in Wisconsin, based in Chicago). I received my BA in English Writing from Saint Mary’s College, with minors in Theatre and Italian. I’ve always loved stories, imagination, and playing pretend, and I knew from a very young age that I wanted to be a writer. Writing and acting have always felt like two sides of the same coin to me, and halfway through college I decided that if I didn’t at least try seriously pursuing acting, I would always wonder what might have been. I’ve pursued both disciplines separately for nearly a decade, and I’m now finally starting to integrate them again through creating my own work for stage.

Along with writing fiction and plays, I have written for magazines like Commonweal, America, and U.S. Catholic; news sources like National Catholic Reporter, Global Sisters Report, and Milwaukee Independent; independent blogs like Grab the Lapels; and private clients in industries ranging from theatre to healthcare to nonprofits. I have also tutored adults and children in language arts and writing. My writing often focuses on the experiences of women, particularly in artistic and religious spaces. Across genres, I am drawn to storytelling that heals and delights.

As an actor, I have performed with regional theaters across the country including American Players Theatre, Writers Theatre, Next Act Theatre, Children’s Theater of Madison, Forward Theater, Lyric Repertory Company, and the Utah, Notre Dame, and Flagstaff Shakespeare Festivals. My first fringe theatre experience was as an actor in The Miles Sisters’ five-star production of The Little Glass Slipper at the 2021 (virtual) Edinburgh Fringe. As a director, I have worked at Flagstaff Shakespeare Festival, Voices Found Repertory, Milwaukee Chamber Theatre, Forward Theater, and elsewhere. And while I got my start in the classics (Shakespeare, primarily), collaborating on new work – my own or another artist’s – brings me the most fulfillment these days. As an actor, director, or fellow playwright, it is a thrill and an honor to be part of the richly collaborative process of bringing new words, stories, and characters into the world, and hearing audiences receive them for the first time.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

I have so many ideas about this! And many of them are still taking shape. But I think what is most necessary to support artists and creatives is a fundamental mindset shift. We need to divest from so many false conceptions of what “art” and “talent” is and return to an understanding of artists and storytellers as essential roles in a community, just like teachers and doctors and maintenance workers and farmers. Artists are laborers and craftspeople, not some mystical thing called “talent” that, if it’s “good” enough, gets whisked away to New York or Los Angeles to create the most lucrative or sophisticated “product.” I think that’s part of why AI appears to be taking over artistic spaces with such alarming speed: We’ve forgotten that art is a service to a community rather than a commodity to be consumed, and we’ve forgotten that it matters that a human being created that art, just as much as it matters that a human being is receiving that art! And we’ve forgotten that human beings in small towns and impoverished neighborhoods and underfunded schools are just as deserving of receiving – and creating! – excellent, powerful, meaningful art that is relevant to them as human beings in New York and Los Angeles.

So we need to support local. We need to see local shows, go to local galleries, read local authors. We need to support self-produced artists: fringe festivals, pop-up events, local concerts. We need to recognize the tempestuous financial reality of a life in the arts at this current moment and work to stabilize that by investing in things that all freelancers can benefit from to build full, healthy lives: affordable housing, universal healthcare, student loan forgiveness, livable wages, commonsense AI legislation to protect intellectual property and creative jobs. In the short term, those with financial means can start grant programs to help fund artists with great ideas in their communities, or just contribute regularly to existing programs: sponsor an arts retreat, or donate to a local theatre that hires local artists. And we absolutely, positively need to keep the arts funded in schools. Not just to create the next generation of artists, but to encourage the next generation of audiences as well; to instill in kids that art is for THEM, there is something for EVERYBODY, and it can play a beautiful, crucial role in their lives and wellbeing, whether they choose to pursue it as a profession or not. Art can build creativity, problem-solving, critical thinking teamwork, empathy, listening skills, the ability to debate and compromise and turn ideas into action.

And for our part, as artists, we need to prove that that’s what we do! We, especially, need to divest from some of the self-centered definitions of success we were taught and think very critically about how our skills and passions can impact the society around us. We need to get involved in our communities, understand our communities, and understand how we contribute. (Community doesn’t just mean geographical area, by the way!)

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I had to really unlearn that there’s a “right” way or a “correct” answer in a creative field. I’m still unlearning that, constantly.

The best way to be the best artist you can be is to…be yourself. And naturally that requires knowing a lot about who “yourself” is – the good, the bad, and the ugly. What YOU like, what brings YOU joy, what makes YOUR skin crawl. And I was told this many times! But I am a perfectionist (in a bad way, not in a cute way) and an eternal student, so I would nod and think I understood but still turn around and drive myself insane trying to find the “right” way to act, the “correct” character choice, the “best” way to get the laugh. Once school was done and getting good grades was a thing of the past, I didn’t know how to trust my own judgment, instinct, or creativity, especially as an actor; I didn’t know when something was “good” without somebody else telling me. I was always, always seeking external validation, from directors and audiences and fellow actors. (Interestingly, I’ve always had less insecurity about my writing, but it would creep in from time to time.)

I still seek validation more than I’d like. But I do it a lot less. I can push through fear better than before. (I was afraid the entire time I was writing SONGS WITHOUT WORDS, but I kept returning to it even when I knew I was failing, and lo and behold I ended up failing my way to a finished play.) I’m a lot more confident than I used to be, and I have started trusting myself more – and accepting the idea of not being perfect. When developing my own work, I have a few trusted people that I turn to for feedback (and I turn to them a lot!). But I’ve learned I can trust my own instincts a lot of the time. I don’t cling to every bit of praise or beat myself up over every criticism anymore. This has been one of the biggest journeys of my creative career: learning how to know, trust, and believe in my own artistic sensibility. I know I have more ground to cover, but I’m proud of how far I’ve come.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.jennifervosters.com
• Instagram: @vostersjennifer
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-vosters-454676a4/
• Other: Also follow my solo show! www.mendelssohnplay.weebly.com. Or @mendelssohnplay on Instagram and Facebook.

Image Credits

Christmas Carol (violin + Scrooge): Ross Zentner
Love’s Labour’s Lost (green skirt): Liz Lauren
Songs Without Words poster: Jeff Kurysz
Portrait with violin and viola: Jeff Kurysz

Other photos courtesy of Jennifer Vosters