Loren Kinesella was born and raised in New Orleans, LA. “I was put into dance class from the time I could stand and was literally onstage by the age of two. Don’t get me wrong, my mom isn’t a ‘stage mom’ or anything like that, it’s just what you do in New Orleans when you would like your kid to grow up with grace. That and the fact that my skin was so pale it’s almost transparent kept me from doing a lot of outdoor sports. I suppose you can say my love for performance began at the moment I was on that stage and since then I have never looked back.” Today, Loren has taken her talents to acting.
Your love for the stage began at the age of two. Share your background.
When you grow up in the South, oftentimes it’s expected for parents to put their kids, especially girls into dance class. This will usually lead to girls going on to be in beauty pageants and things like that. It’s a weird and antiquated tradition, but it’s still around. I didn’t do that. I was put into dance class at a very young age, but I continued dancing. I just loved it. When I was six, I was in the school play performing the coveted role of Longtail in Mikey Goes To Space. Since then, I’ve continued to pursue my stage career. It’s my first love and I can’t think of a better way to spend one’s days.
You attended the prestigious New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts. How did your dance training lead you to your acting career?
NOCCA is great. Really, a spectacular school. I’m so proud to have gone there. That school has shaped me in so many ways. Dance in its purest form is acting with the body. Your body is your instrument, not your voice. The emotion is often the same, but it’s expressed in a different way. Dance certainly gave me the confidence that is needed in acting. I think that when one can claim ownership over their body, one can claim ownership of their emotions. And you certainly can’t forget the discipline involved. Dance gave me discipline which is easily looked over in acting training.
What roles intrigue you?
Interesting question. Obviously, like most actors I want to be challenged. I like to have roles so intense they rip my soul and guts out. That’s the dream, isn’t it? To show human emotion in its most raw and unfiltered state. I love that. Also, I like the opposite. Give me a cute, fluffy, funny character any day. But the real challenge would be to have a mixture of both! Those are the unicorn roles. I’m constantly searching for those. What a wonderful artistically fulfilling experience that would be.
Tell us about your favorite performances.
Several years ago, I was in the tiniest of immersive performances called Give Up The Ghost. This was about a year before COVID. It was brilliant! The entire piece took the audience through a very strange experience in an abandoned church. The role I played was insanely challenging. My character was used as a farm for antibodies to combat a spreading pandemic. I was held prisoner and tortured because the antibodies would only work with the enzyme humans released when they were in massive amounts of pain or in despair. All I wanted was to die, but felt guilty because if I died, so would all of humanity. As an audience member, it was moving to see. As an actor it was brutal. Going through that range of emotions was one of those things that an actor only dreams about. Doing it eight times in one evening is like running a marathon every day for a year. I honestly felt that after that, I could do anything. Not to mention that in less than a year we would be in a global pandemic. That part was just creepy. It’s funny though how often the lesser known roles are the ones that actors find the most rewarding.
In 2019, I was considered for a Primetime Emmy® Award. For a series I wrote and starred in. Without a doubt, one of the most exciting experiences of my life!
I aspire to be someone who can inspire and be someone who young girls can look up to in the future in my perfect world I would be working consistently in film stage and television doing interesting and artistically stretching projects and meet the most interesting on spying artists and create experiences that are memorable and transformative with the audience of course I don’t know where the future will take me but I will do my best to open him open to all possibilities and see what’s happened and if I’m lucky, leave the world a better place in which i found it
Somewhere along the way, she found a love for Martial Arts and trained under Living Legend Grandmaster Chan Pui. Tell us about your experience and which directors you would like to work with in 2023.
For whatever reason, I’m still not sure myself, I chose to go to a traditional style Chinese Kung Fu school and train there. I was one of the only few live-in students. Master Chan himself is a fascinating figure. I wouldn’t be able to do his personal story justice, but it is documented in the film Pui Chan: Kung Fu Pioneer. A terrific documentary if you like that kind of thing. My experience was complex. Yes, I learned a lot of techniques. Many, many traditional forms for combat and weaponry, but I also learned a lot about human nature. Those lessons, I think, are the most valuable. You never really understand people, no matter how hard you try, but I feel that my levels of empathy and loyalty and tenaciousness were what really improved during that time. Of course I worked my tail off physically and competed in a bunch of tournaments as well.
What will directors notice about your work?
There are so very many directors out there whose work I admire. I could go on for hours! Edgar Wright, Danny Boyle, Scorsese, Kathrine Bigelow, Guillermo Del Toro… I could go on forever. And each director has their own vision! I love that. When you can look at a piece and say ‘YES! I feel that!’ When you can feel what the director or directors are expressing through vision or sound, what magic.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1287663/
