Meet Ashlie Burgun

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ashlie Burgun a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Ashlie , we’re thrilled to have you on our platform and we think there is so much folks can learn from you and your story. Something that matters deeply to us is living a life and leading a career filled with purpose and so let’s start by chatting about how you found your purpose.

If I had to distill my purpose into one word, I would say it’s communication. At some point during my childhood, I became motivated to understand people and find understanding from others. I thinking this may have initially been sparked from watching my parents, who sort of represented two sides of myself, constantly arguing and screaming at each other and wanting to find a way to mediate between them. I feel very fortunate that I had access to therapy as a child and that I was given tools to help me process some of the intense things happening at my house. I naturally gravitated towards other kids at school who were dealing with similar difficult situations at home and I tried to share those tools with them, hoping it would help. I found myself frustrated often, watching people fail to communicate what they were feeling and lashing out at others. I found myself always trying to negotiate and neutralize arguments between people I cared about, like I did with my parents. Especially in the world we are in now, that can be so polarized, it’s a skill that I value a lot and I hope is helpful. I have always felt that art in all it’s forms is really just communication and it’s probably why I am drawn to that world.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

I am currently working full time as an actor in various independent projects as well as doing commercials, voice overs, music projects and modeling. I came into the acting world in a sort of unconventional way. I come from a family of musicians and had been in several bands growing up, but that was the limit of my time on any kind of stage. Unlike a lot of NY based actors, I have zero theatre experience and was not in any plays besides a few at summer camp or playing “tree number 3” in those early school plays where they forced everyone in the school to be in. I was a shy, kind of grumpy kid, and it wasn’t until college that like many, I opened up enough to try an acting class and loved it. I still resisted it for a while, thinking it wasn’t part of my identity. I started modeling when some of my photographer friends at art school asked me to pose for their projects and at some point my modeling career slowly transitioned into more and more acting gigs. I have taken many classes and coaching along the way and feel very fortunate that there are so many film oppurtunities in New York and the surrounding areas now. I have now worked on so many wonderful indie film projects and met so many talented people and I really enjoy getting to be a piece in a larger puzzle that helps bring someone’s story to life. Some recent film projects I have been excited to work on are the upcoming Mr. Jack (Mick Lexington, Social Ammunition Films), Clownspiracy (Marc Tarczali, Elizabeth Aurora Petersen, Glitch TV) , 7 Weeks 7 Grand (Bob Racioppo, Box Collins) and Vampire Radio (Hugo Fernandez, Wyld TV). I really love the sometimes chaotic, but endlessly creative and passionate indie film scene, and hope I can continue to be a part of it.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

I think my interest in people and what makes them tick has been a very helpful quality in my pursuit of acting. Everything from my interest in portraiture while I was in art school to writing lyrics has been in some way motivated by wanting to understand others and be understood. Story telling through acting and films/TV is such a great way to comunicate these things. The second quality I believe I have that has been beneficial in this career is having a thick skin. I am pretty hard on myself to begin with when it comes to artistic pursuits and I usually don’t take criticisms personally. And finally, although it has at times made life more difficult for me, especially as a kid going through school, I think my ability to think outside the box and roll with changes has helped me often in my career. Especially in the indie film scene, there are always going to be last minute changes and things going wrong, and being able to maintain a good attitude during the chaos makes everything easier. Even on the hardest, longest days on a set, I am mentally way more at peace than after clocking out at a 9-5 desk job. If I had any advice for someone getting into acting, I would say if it’s something you really love, not to lose sight of how lucky you are to get to do this thing that you are passionate about. Try to see even the negative things as a learning experience, and treat everything from student films to bigger budget projects with the same respect.

How would you spend the next decade if you somehow knew that it was your last?

I am a chronic optimist and refuse to dwell on when I might perish but I did have an experience that feels relevant to this question. Both of my parents passed away kind of young (my dad at 61 and mom at 59) in a span of 5 years. I was just entering adulthood at that time but still very immature in a lot of ways and these experiences, especially my mom’s passing, had a huge impact on me and my perspective on life. Being confronted with mortality in this way was of course a shock. It made me think about how I was spending my time and what i was doing with my life. At the time, I was working full time in an office, a job that felt like a grown up decision, because it was salary and had benefits, but it was not something I was very passionate about. My parents never pressured me to do anything in particular so I was surprised when I realized that had been making decisions that I thought they wanted, that could maybe allow me to help them at some point since they were always struggling financially. When I didn’t have them there to look to, to see if they were proud or felt relieved in some way, I was forced to think about what these things meant to me and what I wanted for myself. That was when I decided to start taking acting more seriously and try to do it full time, hoping I could do something that would make me proud as well. I wish I could have come to this conclusion without having something terrible happen like this, but in my case I don’t know if I ever would have. So I guess my answer is, if I knew I only had 10 years left, I would probably be doing exactly what I’m doing now.

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Image Credits

HudValley Photo, Rafael Mercedes, Joseph Parks, Mick Lexington, Benton Collins

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