Kirsten Childs

Kirsten Childs started writing and performing musicals when she was just a young girl and turned her childhood obsession with music and performing into a successful career as an actress, lyricist, and playwright. Childs, who moved from Los Angeles to New York in the early 1980s, initially resisted her creative impulses and worked as a secretary for Merrill Lynch and the United Nations before realizing her true passion was performing. She began going out on auditions and landed minor roles in high-profile shows like "Chicago" and "Sweet Charity," both choreographed by award-winning dancer and director Bob Fosse. In 1989 she scored her only major film role as Richard Pryor's sister in "See No Evil, Hear No Evil," about a deaf man (Gene Wilder) and a blind man (Richard Pryor) who outwit a group of thieves. After spending much of the '90s honing her composing and lyrical talents, in 2000 Childs debuted "The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin," a one-woman show about a young black girl coming of age amidst the social and cultural upheaval of the '60s and '70s. The show proved so popular that it moved to Off-Broadway, where it enjoyed a brief but critically-acclaimed run. A few years later Childs returned to the stage with "Miracle Brothers," a sprawling tale of two brothers in 17th century Brazil, and has since become involved with Open Doors, an arts-in-schools program; and written "Wasted," a drug-abuse play commissioned by a New Jersey philanthropic organization.