With a pianist for a father, Alison Hodgson Whitehurst ’12 sometimes crashed weddings and parties growing up and watched live bands from sound booths. “I remember thinking, ‘How do I get to do that?’ ”
Courtesy of Alison Whitehurst
She began taking piano lessons at 6 and decided to focus on singing a few years later. In eighth grade she enrolled in a theater class, thinking she would make friends at her new school. Instead, she found her future.
“I found out there was this beautiful hybrid of music and storytelling,” she said. “Since then, it’s just been what I’ve been about.”
The Sugar Land, Texas, native studied musical theatre at TCU. “I was surrounded by professors who were invested in me not only as a performer but as a person and who understood that my growth as a human mattered just as much as whatever I achieved.”
She played Skater Girl in The Fortress of Solitude at the Dallas Theater Center and was invited to join the cast at The Public Theater in New York City. “That changed the game.”
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