Catching up with Leah Teplin
Since graduating from Huntington High School in 2007, Leah Teplin has had some fascinating experiences. She traveled to many countries as part of her program at Bennington College in Vermont. It can be said, she’s a student of the world.
Ms. Teplin is a junior and while she’s found Bennington academically challenging, the college suits her just fine. “This is a really fun school, and even though the grading usually is very very strict, it's got a very open-ended structure, which allowed me to ‘evolve’ my major rather then change it, from screenwriting and Japanese to a combined major in history and film/theatre,” she said. “Plus, I get some really fantastic opportunities such as getting to write and direct my own production, or have clothes I've made in the semester's fashion show.”
As part of her program, Ms. Teplin, who in high school was a member of the English and art honor societies, is required to spend two months each winter on a field work team, performing work in her field for college credit. These experiences have allowed her to both travel and bulk up her resume. She’s used her Huntington connections on two such excursions.
In her first year at Bennington Ms. Teplin worked with Stages on the Sound, a theatre troupe based in New York City that she was familiar with through the Huntington High School drama club. “We teamed up with them to do “Romeo and Juliet” in 2007” Ms. Teplin recalled. The Huntington alum’s next field experience took her to Shanghai in China where she interned with former Huntington art teacher David Gran.
“Through him I was able to get an internship at his new school's theatre department,” Ms. Teplin said. Traveling around Shanghai and Beijing with Mr. and Mrs. Gran was so cool, and the work was fun. I helped organize the backstage work with a few school assemblies and theatre classes, but mostly I helped run the ISTA Festival (International School Theatre Association). It involved international schools from all over the world coming to the Shanghai American School and doing theatre workshops with theatre professionals for about a week, plus the social events and tourist outings; a lot to organize!”
There will be no field work team experience this year since Ms. Teplin is abroad at Roehampton University in London. She’s studying English and French history and visiting easy to reach places such as Leeds, Bath and Paris, France. “I've been getting more and more into the histories of science and religion, particularly the medieval era,” she said. “Science and religion really were heavily intertwined for centuries.”
In the spring the Huntington grad will be heading to Prague in the Czech Republic to study film production at the Prague Film School. “I've already started writing the script I'll be directing while I'm there,” Ms. Teplin said. “With any luck it'll be good enough to
submit to the Dresden Short Film Festival next winter!”
As for the future, well, Ms. Teplin is already well on her way to having a firm plan of action. “After graduating Bennington, I hope to work in film editing to pay for going to school part-time for a master’s degree in film, and then in medieval history,” she said. “While it would have been nice to live in a time where I could just be an academic forever, in this day and age I'm shooting for a spot in the production/research team at a television station like the Discovery Channel or BBC History. Maybe that will be a steady enough job to give me the capital to write and direct some feature-length films.”
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