Mira E. Stanley

Mira Stanley grew up in Charleston, WV, the daughter of a musician and visual artist. She fell in love with the arts at an early age, and spent summers pursuing dance, theatre, and visual arts at the Interlochen Center for the Arts, and then musical theatre at Ann Reinking's Broadway Theatre Project. She attended the Boston Conservatory before deciding to take some time off, during which she lived in NYC interning with theatre companies and dance studios, even dabbling in philosophy one summer at Columbia University, and later moving on to finish her Theatre Arts degree at the University of Michigan. It was at UM where she came across a course entitled "Theatre & Social Change" which lead her to her heavy involvement with the Prison Creative Arts Project (prisonarts.org) -- an organization that aims to bring the arts to all places where it is absent or has been removed. This allowed her to co-facilitate workshops in creative writing at a women's prison as well as improvisational theatre workshops in Detroit Public High Schools, where she also created plays with students with autism. During her last year at UM, Mira brought students from the theatre and English departments back to one of these schools to perform and act alongside 9th graders each week as they studied Shakespeare. When she graduated and teamed up with her partner (now fiancé) Chuck Costa, they excitedly combined they're backgrounds in different workshops, establishing CT Sings: Stories from the Constitution State, their acclaimed indie-folk duo THE SEA THE SEA and ultimately, Where The Songs Come From.