Our Mission

At YSAA, we are passionate and pragmatic idealists.

We believe that our work makes the world a better place. Actors are asked to walk in anothers shoes and to understand human behavior. In doing this, we learn compassion. Compassion gives us the Courage to be ourselves while understanding others must be themselves. We believe that a Commitment to that understanding will translate to all areas of an artists life.

Compassion, Courage, and Commitment are the values we live by and what we instill in our work and in our students. In our industry, success and the attendant pandering that comes with it can lead to Vanity, Arrogance and Self Interest. We want to give our students tools that will lead them to be the Clooneys and Streeps of the world, not the Kardashians or the Lohans.

Our students are expected to be great. We set the bar high and they are expected to meet or exceed it. They are expected to stretch toward failure. They must push themselves beyond their comfort level. We also expect our students to be UNIQUE and we celebrate this quality in them. No one has ever become great by being cookie cutter. You can certainly get to the middle being like all the others but you can not achieve greatness. We look at each student with intense curiosity to see what it is that makes them special. We then develop that quality so they can shine. Our motto is Shine Your Light. We believe the world is well served when all of us Shine.

Compassion, Courage, and Commitment help an artist interpret their work. Compassion for the character they are playing, the courage to play what is honest and vulnerable about the character, and commitment to their work is what an artist needs. Vanity, Arrogance, and Self-Interest can pay off. There are many famous and wealthy actors who have those small minded qualities. We do not want to train them.

You will notice that you cannot sign up online for our school. That is because we want to know the parents of our students prior to enrollment. We want to make sure the parents are willing to support their children in their career and that we get each artist into a class that will truly benefit them. Not everyone is accepted. We want to make sure that everyone who comes here is ready for the type of instruction we give and the standard of work they must do.

We want to contribute making the world a better place through art. It is a long tradition in the arts and we are proud to be a part of it.

On a practical level, this idealistic method has been working. Our students are enormously successful award nominated and winning artists, and excellent human beings. It is a pleasure to do the process of this work but seeing the joy in our students is immeasurably satisfying.

Our students also are doing good work with their lives. They have created videos that express their beliefs, volunteered for organizations like www.projectlimelight.com and created their own charities to help stop intolerance and bullying, www.wearesbnn.com

We could not be more proud of their compassion, courage, and commitment.