She left Deerfield for New York City, studying at Marymount Manhattan College, where she earned her BFA in Acting. There, she discovered a love for classical theatre—its rhythm, its timelessness, its ability to speak across centuries. The words of Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw felt less like relics and more like living things, waiting for someone to give them new breath.

After graduating, she took center stage, acting in plays in NYC as well as regional theatres across the country. She played Rosalind in As You Like It (Uprising Theatre Co.), found her Romeo in Romeo & Juliet (In BK Productions), and even became Sherlock Holmes at Cape May Stage in the New Jersey premiere of Kate Hamill’s Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson – Apt. 2B. The Shaw Project’s Pygmalion, Columbia University’s Macbeth—each one another step deeper into the thing she loved most: making something old feel electric again.

She trained in fight choreography, studying under Jared Kirby at New York Combat for Stage & Screen and at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. She learned how movement could tell a story just as powerfully as speech, how a well-timed strike could carry just as much meaning as a poetic soliloquy. She went on to choreograph fights for York College and an award-winning music video, and even honed her own skills in martial arts on the side.

Leah became an actor for one reason—because people tell stories to understand their world. The world may be difficult. There may be struggle, grief, and uncertainty. But inside a story, there is the possibility of transformation—of stepping into another life, another time, another fate. We watch movies and go to the theatre to escape, yes, but also to be reminded. Of each other, and of ourselves.

She believes in the power of stories to pull people together, to make them feel when they thought they couldn’t, to make them remember what it is to be human. That is why she keeps telling them.