LAFAYETTE PARISH — At her core, Anna Sternaman is a storyteller.
At just nine years old, she began attending the Lafayette based theater company CYT, which Sternaman says inadvertently inspired her to make performance a way of life, “I kept doing it through my teen years and I didn’t realize how much it was shaping me as a person.”
Rather than referring to herself as an actress, Sternaman says she’s most comfortable with the title of storyteller because she “performs on stages and in films telling other people’s stories.”
Sternaman shares that performing on stage is where she feels most at home, “The second that I set foot on a stage, I truly feel like I’m at home, there’s a sort of comfort and excitement that comes with it for me.”
It's that excitement that Sternaman says pushed her to pursue her storytelling interests at the collegiate level.
After graduating high school, Sternaman took her storytelling interests to the collegiate level and studied theater at McNeese State University in Lake Charles for two years before transferring to Northwestern State University in Natchitoches where she graduated with a bachelor's degree in fine arts.
Sternaman describes post graduation as a balancing act, she says, “as soon as you get out of college it’s like you’re sent to the wild and then you kind of just have to learn to stay afloat.”
While Sternaman says she’s still in the process of learning exactly how to stay afloat, she finds maintaining a perspective that puts consistency at the forefront has been helpful “it's more of a marathon than a sprint and I truly see myself doing this till I’m old and gray.”
