Meet Lisa Chess

We recently connected with Lisa Chess and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Lisa, thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?

When I was six years old, my mother enrolled me in a ballet class. Apparently, the teacher (Miss Joanne, I still remember her name) thought I showed some promise and communicated that to my mom.

I also really liked this class and wanted to take more than one class a week but at that time my mother was a single mom and we couldn’t afford more. So, my mother, also being pretty strict, said that I needed to practice at home, after school, a certain number of days a week. This would make up for only being in class once a week.

The discipline must have taken hold then because I eventually became a professional dancer for ten years, toward the end of college, until age twenty-nine.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

As I mentioned earlier, I started my professional career as a dancer (in a modern dance company and in musical theater). I decided to retire from this just before the age of thirty because, unless you’re a prima ballerina, the career is short and eventually punishing on the body.

At this time, I decided to explore acting with the well-known Los Angeles based acting coach, Peggy Feury, of the Actors Studio. I had been absolutely obsessed with dance and now, lo and behold, I could express myself not just through movement but also with speaking and I fell in love with the process. My acting work has been in the theater, film and television. Credits can be found at lisachess.com. Important, fun note…I have worked with Michele Palermo on one indie film , three plays, and her latest TV project, Middlehood. I love acting in her projects!

I also began teaching acting while pursuing acting jobs and I teach to this day. In NY I taught at SVA, NYU SPS, and here in LA, at UCLAx (where I currently teach).

Also, while in NY, I began directing solo performance shows that have traveled the US and Canada.

My latest endeavor has been writing and I’ve co-written a Horror/Fantasy Feature called WE SEE YOU that’s been an official selection in several film festival screenplay divisions, garnering one Best Horror award.

All of the areas in which I’ve worked have had their own special brand of excitement.

Dance and the music that accompanied it were beyond exhilarating. Also, the ability to master one’s own body so that you could conquer difficult choreography was deeply satisfying.

Acting, with its unique collaboration of actor, writer, and director has been its own kind of magic. The work of acting, that is, because we know the career of acting can be disappointing because so much of it is out of one’s control. So, when I talk to students about the career versus the work, I emphasize the separation. “If you LOVE the work, then you should pursue it. But not simply because you want to be a star. It’s about the process.”

Now, I also really like directing because I love communicating with actors at a deeply psychological and emotional level. If I can successfully communicate what I see in a character and a scene and then they, the actors, “get it”, magic!

Writing has been the most difficult for me, probably because it’s the newest form for me to tackle. And, of course, it’s a solitary process which is different from my other work.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

I think I’ve always dived into the various areas of my work with a pretty high level of abandon and determination. I also prepared my skill/work with a high level of discipline.

My advice to those early in their journey, what I would tell my younger self, is to TRUST the work and preparation you’ve done. Don’t second guess yourself or look to others to validate that.

Take all your work and dive in! Be open to suggestion and, of course, collaboration, but be brave and move forward.

Is there a particular challenge you are currently facing?

At this point in my artistic journey, I’m looking to merge some of my abilities to create a new project. This is to say, I would like to write and direct a short film. I’ve directed in the theater a fair amount and I’ve taught a class in acting for the camera at UCLAx for the last few years. I’ve learned a lot about camera work from my TA Cinematographer. And, of course, I have a lot of experience in front of the camera, as an actor.

So, this is the current goal. However, the challenge or number one obstacle to this is writing the script for it, finding the idea. I don’t have the idea yet but I realize that the only way to find it is to have the discipline to write even when there’s no idea. Just sit down with the empty page/computer screen and write. This is how I’m trying to resolve it. It’s underway, not yet resolved. Haha…I’ll let you know!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://lisachess.com
• Instagram: lisavenicegirl
• Facebook: Lisa Chess