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New York-based actress and activist, Emeline O'Hara has led the cast of several award-winning independent films. She was born in the Midwest, and raised on a small farm in Minnesota.
Emeline has been on stage since she could speak (likely for the sanity of the adults in her life). However, her 2001 role as The Child in a St. Olaf College production of Luigi Pirandello's dark absurdist play, Six Characters in Search of an Author, drove her mother to put a stark halt on any potential career in child acting. Unfortunately, this did not rid her of the acting bug, and she enrolled at the Perpich Center for Arts Education as a theater student, and then to Hampshire College where she studied film and first worked with her long-time creative collaborator, Director Caz McGovern.
Her first high-profile role as Rosetta in the crowd-funded Halo fan film Dawn Under Heaven (2019) generated 1.5 million views on YouTube and gave Emeline some insight into the growing animosity against women and minorities amongst American sci-fi audiences. But it seems she can't shake the genre, as she wrote and co-starred in humankind (2016) a year after Dawn Under Heaven's wrap. The short was inspired by her disillusionment of surviving under capitalism.
This same disillusionment is part of what endeared Emeline toward working with Aswar Rahman's "Cineapolis" group, starring in three of the actors studio's resulting films: Achilles (2016), Salone (2016), Soirée (2017), and Troika (2017). Salone struck a personal chord with Emeline's life-long anxiety to live in accordance with her political values, while holding the reality that it's impossible to fully disengage from imperialism - a core struggle of the film's main character, Arjun.
In one 2015 Cineapolis interview, Emeline was asked what makes a "great" actor. She explained that great actors "understand the relationship between strength and vulnerability. These two traits are classically pitted against each other, but neither can exist without the other." Her fascination with this particular dichotomy is what's fueled her best work, most recently in Caz McGovern's award-winning indie isolation horror They Don't Leave (2023). She led the film as Carly, a young, haunted, divorced alcoholic seeking sobriety at her remote ancestral cabin in Montana. Carly then begins to learn more about her family's traumatic history.
At the 2023 premiere of the film in Show Low, Arizona, Emeline was asked how she manages the emotional weight of such a dark plot. She answered, "because this storyline is so personal to me, it gave me a level of catharsis that I don't think I could have found outside of living in it for that period of time. And now that it's released, I can let it go, and let other people have their own experience with the film. There's something very spiritually healing in that."
Emeline continues to work from her New York home base; either trekking it to set on the subway, or flying out to wherever her next role takes her. She is forever on the hunt for a good story, and in her words as a guest on the United Nations' 2024 International Day of Education panel, "I love stories; they are so important. They really are a source of liberation [...] Thankfully, there is an abundance of people, and people are stories."
