Laurie Brown Kindred (Producer & Host) originally hails from south Louisiana.  After studying theatre for three years at Stephens College in Columbia, MO (the second oldest women’s college in the United States), she moved with her then boyfriend, now husband to Philadelphia and soon after New York City.  For the next 14 years, she worked with Don Frantz at Town Square Productions, where managed and created live entertainment and special events.  From Broadway to Off-Broadway, to China and theme parks to corporate events and non-profits, her talents and skills have been used on almost every platform.  With TSP, she served as Production Manager for the original international-award winning musical KaTonga at Busch Gardens Tampa (2004 IAAPA’s Big E Award), Wagner’s Gotterdammerung with the LA Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, and SeaWorld Adventure Parks’ Believe, in which she also served as Video Director (winner of 2006 IAAPA’s Big E Award and THEA’s Best Outdoor Show Award.  In 2007, she helped open the Nederlander’s Broadway China headquarters in Beijing, which led her to managing China’s first Broadway production, Soul of Shaolin in 2009, and the 2008 Chinese production of Dream of Red Chamber at New York’s Jazz at Lincoln Center.  As Associate General Manager, she worked on Broadway’s A Tale of Two Cities and Off Broadway’s Summer of ’42 and All Too Human (also directed).  Since 2009, she has managed the annual cultural event, Japan Day @ Central Park, which is attended by more than 50,000 people each year.  After leaving TSP, she served as Managing Director for The Center at West Park, responsible for converting the West Park Presbyterian Church into a cultural arts center and organizing its capital campaign restoration project.  In 2015, she served as Associate Producer on the documentary, Thao’s Library, which won the Audience Award at Bentonville Film Festival, thus was given a 19 city viewing at AMC theatres across the country.  As of 2017, she has served as Production Manager at Pace University’s School of Performing Arts in downtown Manhattan, in charge of mounting their 14 various annual productions ranging from plays and musical, to large-scale dance concerts, devised ensemble work and short films. 

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Within her personal life, she married her college sweetheart Graham Kindred in 2002, and became a mom to their identical twins, Penelope & Sophia, in 2008.  But it wasn’t until 2011, when life really challenged their family and she was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer after doing a self-exam.  For the next 11 months, when their daughters were just three years old, she had a double mastectomy, went through 4.5 months of chemo and 6 weeks of radiation.  Life throughout all of it, continued.  But during that time, Laurie found her voice and strength by blogging her journey through cancer.  Her writing became her therapy and brought forth the dirty truths of people diagnosed and living with breast cancer.  Before her cancer returned nearly nine years later, she had already been working on the podcast to highlight not only her story, but the stories of many others.   But at the start of the pandemic, a random cat scan, authorized simple because she had symptoms similar to shingles, showed that her cancer had metastasized to her lower spine, making her want to jumpstart getting those voices heard much more. 

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In her ‘spare time,’ Laurie is a lead volunteer at Jenny’s Garden, in West Harlem, a community garden that services not only her local neighborhood but also a nearby soup kitchen.  The garden has become her second form of therapy, giving her strength in giving back to so many in need, and a beacon of natural beauty in a world where we see the ugly more often than we’d like.