Tasa Faronii-Butler

I discovered the magic of the stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music when I was four years old. Studying the piano and the viola in a time and space where little girls that looked like me were not often seen led me to NYC's High School of Music & Art. It didn't seem like a big deal at the time, just me enjoying my life, but I was a founding member of the NY Youth Symphony Orchestra.

I had the pleasure of creating the original character Billie Jean Off-Broadway in JE Franklin's Black Girl and L'il Bo in the film The Cross and the Switchblade. I honed my chops as a social justice activist, graduated from CCNY, and began working with young people who needed to know they could do and be any good thing their heart guided them to. What I dared not say aloud became the fodder for my writing. This wonderful life happened by the age of thirty.

Then I had my first child, second, third, and fourth child. Before I knew it, these four angels had become my audience; my fellow cast members, my stand partners, my life.

When my oldest daughter announced she was getting her Master's degree, I said: 'Wait! What?" Where had the time gone? "It's not a competition!" she assured me. Yeah. Right.

Fortunately, much of my musing and scribbling during this time was salvageable. I have been able to rewrite, edit, publish, and produce a few of the plays, essays, and short stories penned during this maternal period of my life.

Performances of Dixie Peach, a play about unencumbered love because its main characters are blind, were well received by audiences in the Catskill Mountain region. Wolf: the Musical is a fun children's play about a wolf who learns that animals who can read and write are not to be contended with. The first two books of the five-book young adult historical fiction series, The Way Makers, about America's slavery and the Underground Railroad, are available online and in local bookstores.

Finally, I earned a master's degree in Health Arts & Science from Goddard College in Vermont and a doctorate in Educational Leadership & Change from Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, California. I focus on the therapeutic use of sound for individuals with learning differences.

Stage 32 is my way of connecting with individuals that can join me as I combine all the stuff I have done with all the stuff yet for me to do.