Colby Minifie

As a professional actor since age 11, Colby Minifie ’14 (Hunter), has appeared in Eugene O’Neil’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the television series Glee and Nurse Jackie, and many other television, film and theater roles.

She believes that Macaulay’s student-focused approach allowed her to flourish during her undergraduate years.“The option would have been to attend conservatory,” said Colby, who has seen many young actors focus exclusively on their careers in film, television and theater. By contrast, her intellectual pursuits provided a rich education as well as fuel for her acting, opening up new opportunities.

“You have to have knowledge and experience in order to be able to bring emotional and psychological truth to your characters,” she notes. While she developed her acting career, landing coveted parts on stage and screen, Colby found Macaulay’s courses–on topics as diverse as the apocalypse and Thoreau–to be nothing short of “life-changing.”

Colby took a semester off to work with Rosie Perez and David Hyde Pierce in Close Up Space at the Manhattan Theater Club. Other credits include Law and Order: SVU, The Michael J. Fox Show, The Black Box, The Blacklist, a gala performance for the National YoungArts Foundation (working with Bill T. Jones), and a TriBeCa Film Festival premier, Deep Powder.

Colby majored in Studio Art and Performance Theory, and wrote her undergraduate thesis on the life and work of David Foster Wallace. She was also a Lisa Goldberg/Revson Scholar.

“I’ve never met a group of people more eager to learn or who have such an incredible amount of knowledge,” she enthuses about the Macaulay environment. The demanding coursework has propelled her to a higher level “than I even knew existed” in the classroom.