She Started Right Here.

Carolyn "Carrie" Braver grew up in this community, fell in love with performing here, and then went on to build an accomplished career in American theater and film. She is now an actor and director for stage and screen. 

She grew up in Tempe and started at MCC when she was 5 years old in Magical Music Kidz Summer Workshop and going on to win Zoni’s for mainstage MCC productions.  

Now, with a professional acting career spanning two decades in NYC, LA and Chicago, favorite highlights include playing Pearl in the Tony-nominated Broadway revival of The Iceman Cometh starring Denzel Washington, Austin Butler and David Morse, directed by George C. Wolfe; originating the role of Zoe in the Tony-nominated Broadway Premiere of Airline Highway directed by Joe Mantello (the original director of Wicked), as well as at the esteemed Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago. 

She also played Ray Donovan’s origin story in The Ray Donovan Movie, and made a bunch of bad decisions in the season finale of FBI. The short film she wrote, directed and produced alongside Nomadica Films for Academy Award nominated actors Ed Harris and recent Academy Award winner Amy Madigan, was recently completed and premiered at the Phoenix Film Festival. She will also direct the World Premiere of Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Beth Henley’s play The Unbuttoning, in LA. She produces through her production company Kid Sister Productions.  She thinks creative storytelling is more visceral than academic and strongly believes art and the act of creating it should be an enjoyable experience. 

I've been obsessed with acting since I was 8 years old. 

I grew up right here in the Valley — performing for local audiences pretty much full time after school for ten years. I tried to take some acting classes... and I found them to not make much sense to incorporate when I was actually doing shows. It wasn't until I was working at a professional level that I understood why — a lot of what classes teach are at worst irrelevant to acting professionally or at best only dancing around ideas of how to act.

Acting training has a reputation for being confusing. Mysterious. A little mystical. And I'd say about 20% of that is fair — there is some quality of presence and creative instinct that just befalls certain people. But 80% of it is a learnable skillset. A specific, nameable, teachable set of skills that most training never quite identifies or directly teaches in a pragmatic way.

I know what acting actually demands because I've been in the room.

I have had the privilege of working with — in scene as an actor and as a director — some of the most gifted actors alive. Denzel Washington. Ed Harris. Amy Madigan. Bill Irwin. Carrie Coon. Every single time, I stayed in the room to watch. To study. To break down what they were actually doing, and why it was working, and how a person could be taught to do it too.

Actors all get there a little differently but what they are eventually doing are the same core skills. And those skills are teachable.