Filmmaker Tessa Blake was born in Houston in 1969, and reared between Texas, Colorado, and Europe.
The combined elements of her parents' divorce and her extensive education exposed Tessa to a remarkable variety of
cultures and lifestyles from an early age. Experience from the provincial to the cosmopolitan taught Tessa to become
something of a social chameleon, and she is as comfortable in Houston's fashionable River Oaks as in New York's funky
Greenwich Village. It is this unique sensibility that makes Five Wives, Three Secretaries and Me such a candid look at
the secret world of Houston's upper crust.
Tessa's childhood afforded her enormous exposure to new and different experiences. She attended kindergarten and primary
schools throughout the US and Europe. Sent to boarding school in Scotland at the age of eight, Tessa spent two years
enrolled at the Gordonstoun School in Aberlour-on-Spey. She returned to the States at ten, and attended Aspen Country
Day School for the next four years. High school yielded a return to boarding school, this time at Connecticut's Choate
Rosemary Hall. Accepted as a Morehead Scholar at the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Tessa majored in English
and Classics. She was graduated with honors, and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1991.
Having acted in and directed both theater and television productions in Chapel Hill, Tessa went on to graduate
study in New York. At Parson's School of Design, she had her first taste of filmmaking, directing the comic short,
Stone's Throw. Later, at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, she met legendary theater director Richard
Schechner and agreed to join his fledgling East Coast Artists as Executive Director in 1993.
In the fall of 1994, Tessa left ECA to form Asset Pictures, a multimedia production company based in Manhattan. Between
filming trips to Houston, she spent time in LA overseeing the LA Weekly award-winning theatrical production of playwright
Keith Curran's The Stand-In. At home in New York City, she also served as the Executive Producer of director Michael De
Avila's Burnzey's
Last Call
|
