Authors, Actors, and Audiobook Alumnae

Actress Gilli Messer ’10 encounters many Barnard alums at work

Gilli Messer is an actress in Los Angeles working in television and film. Recently, she’s begun narrating audiobooks, during which, she says, she keeps running into Barnard alums.

“With so many prolific authors coming out of Barnard, it’s no surprise that there’s such a strong Barnard presence in the audiobook world,” she says.

She recently collaborated on an audiobook with producer Molly Lo Re ’17. And on completing the narration of Happily (Penguin, 2023), a “memoir in essays” by Sabrina Orah Mark ’97, Messer discovered that Mark, too, went to Barnard.

“None of us knew the other went to Barnard beforehand; we discovered it after the projects were completed,” she says. “It seems that everywhere you go that’s interesting and creative you bump into Barnard women.”

Messer says that her liberal arts background at Barnard prepared her for an acting career well beyond the acting, speech, and movement training she received in partnership with Juilliard. She majored in anthropology and minored in French, spent a semester abroad in Russia, and holds dual Israeli-U.S. citizenship, so she speaks Hebrew as well. It’s the sort of background that has made her adept at duplicating a variety of accents.

That’s not to say she doesn’t have to do her research with the seemingly familiar. At press time, she was preparing to go back into the studio to record a book featuring a protagonist from the modern Orthodox Jewish community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. And while she certainly knows the culture and the language, she turned to yet another Barnard alumna to get the nuances right. She made a list of words she wasn’t sure about and contacted Aryanna Garber ’10, who hails from the old neighborhood: “I couldn’t say it authentically as she would, with the same inflections and pronunciation.”

Her time at Barnard, she says, provided the diverse learning experience that has helped expand her acting career well beyond a single medium: “It was my ticket to the party with these books.”

—Tom Stoelker

On the Road

Singer-songwriter Edie Carey ’96 relishes performing live

Music is an intensely personal process for Edie Carey, one that she’s been honing for years. Carey’s a folk musician based in Colorado whose songwriting career has taken her from performing at local Upper West Side venues to national tours. In June 2022, she released The Veil, an album that contemplates the thin but precious covering around time, family, and oneself.

Carey was raised in a household passionate about language, a passion that found its way into her insightful and accessible lyrics. She expanded her musical knowledge at Barnard within New York’s singer-songwriter milieu and developed her performance chops busking on the streets of Italy.

Now a wife and mother, Carey was moved to write The Veil’s title track in the midst of familial and global dangers. In early 2020, after Carey and her children were in a serious car accident and with the world on the brink of a pandemic shutdown, themes on seeking stability resonated.

“In one verse of that song, the veil refers to the thin shroud of security we all want to believe we have between us and danger and how disturbing it is when that shroud is suddenly torn away,” Carey says.

Across the album’s 12 tracks, Carey parses this fraught but vital barrier and its symbolic reverberations throughout past and present, in family and marriage, and our perceptions of one another.

Carey is currently on tour through the fall to promote The Veil and finds it a rewarding experience to reconnect with audiences after COVID-19 isolation.

“After doing this work for 23 years,” she says, “I have never appreciated more the magical, emotional exchange between a performer and an audience.” —Isabella Pechaty ’23