Authors, Actors, and Audiobook Alumnae

Image

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. 

Image

“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.”