A.. My Name is Amanda

       Amanda Campbell was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia and began her writing career at a year and a half when she started to “read” the Sears catalogue and the telephone book aloud to her stuffed animals. She always wanted to tell the longest stories. Once she figured out how to use a pencil, she used drawings and words to craft her first two novels, which were bound in Fivestar notebooks. At the age of seven she had her first public reading of her short story Matthew and the Unicorn at an Open House at Sacred Heart School. She would continue to write stories and novels compulsively throughout elementary and junior high.

          At the age of eight Amanda joined her school choir, participated in her first musical, and watched the first piece of theatre that she can remember, a High School production of You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown. By the time she was eleven she had developed a fervent admiration for actors, could recite Anne of Green Gables- the Musical in its entirety, and began to take classes at Neptune Theatre School in attempt to overcome her shyness.

          In Junior High, Amanda had small roles in two musicals, performed in a collective creation in the Atlantic Fringe Festival, and played Winnie in No, No Nanette. She also appeared in Elsinore Theatre’s production of The Wizard of Oz at Neptune’s Studio Theatre. At the same time, she wrote stories for her friends voraciously, and grew into a zealous Renthead. At fourteen, she began The Quest, the Key and Faith, a novel for the young and young at heart that she completed in 2008.

          In Grade 11 Amanda got the opportunity to perform in the Nova Scotia Youth Arts Showcase and toured to elementary schools around the province in I Believe in Make Believe with Neptune’s Youth Performance Company.

It was at this time that Amanda became interested in promoting (and basically launching the careers of) her talented friends. She adopted the attitude that despite the fact that she was a little girl from Halifax, she could do anything and so she set about trying to get her friend a guest spot on The Rosie O’Donnell Show. Having learned how to shoot and professionally edit a videotape (with a voiceover!), speaking with O’Donnell’s secretary and emailing with Morris Greenberg, who played the saxophone on O’Donnell’s show, Amanda shifted her attention toward getting said friend an audition for Gypsy on Broadway starring Bernadette Peters. After getting advice from Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents, seventeen year old Amanda received an extremely generous letter from director Sam Mendes telling her where to send her friend’s headshot and resume.

In 2003 Amanda went to Dalhousie University with the intention of auditioning for the Acting Program at the end of her first year, and becoming a professional musical theatre actor. Despite being inspired by the great Nigel Bennett, one of her acting professors, Amanda became enchanted and captivated with the academic theatrical world. She shocked her classmates by not auditioning for the Acting Program and traipsed merrily into Academia.

As a student of David Overton’s Directing Class in 2005, Amanda directed two short projects in the style of New York’s avant-garde Wooster Group. She then directed an outdoor production of her own abridged version of Peter Pan. She returned to the stage in Raquel Duffy’s production of Jesus Christ Superstar at St. Matthew’s Church, and then wrote her own musical Waiting for Bernadette which premiered at the David Mack Murray Theatre in 2006. She also was thrilled at the opportunity to Assistant Direct David Overton's production of Urinetown at DalTheatre. 

After graduating with an Honours BA in Theatre Studies from Dalhousie University, Amanda went on toward her MA at the University of Toronto. She has firmly rooted herself in the study of Canadian theatre and musical theatre, and seeks to use everything she learns to foster and champion the arts, and to forge her own practical path in the theatre community. She began writing theatre reviews and developed her blog on a whim in September 2007, returning once again to her impulse to promote those whose talents she believes in. The Way I See It marries her love of writing with her love of theatre and it is one of her proudest achievements to date. She has also recently completed her first full-length play Fantastical Painted Souls which she hopes will premiere in the 2009 Atlantic Fringe Festival.

Amanda continues to meander between Halifax and Toronto. Each summer she returns to Neptune Theatre School where she has been teaching theatre games and “techniques” to four to nine year olds for the past three years. In all, she guesstimates that she has written (or improvised) over fifty short playlets for her students to perform.