CHS alums pursuing careers in arts and media

By Mary Ann Price

The story below appears in the Citizen’s 31st annual Salute to the Fine Arts, an 8-page special section included with the June 3 print edition.

Growing up, Grace-Mary Burega was very close to her older brother. When he started watching the animated comedy series The Simpsons, she did too. She found that she loved the music of the show, becoming aware of how the scoring enhanced the story lines. Over time, she also knew she wanted to be like Lisa Simpson, a character in the show who played the alto saxophone. Burega started learning the instrument when she was in fourth grade and later moved on to the baritone sax. At Canton High School, she focused on music performance, playing the saxophone, clarinet, and flute in the band.

Grace-Mary Burega

“I didn’t really know film scoring was something I would do,” she said. “I knew I wanted to go study film scoring, but I wasn’t actively scoring when I was in high school.”

After graduating from CHS in 2014, Burega went on to Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she majored in film scoring with a minor in TV scoring. She began to score films professionally about four years ago while still an undergraduate and is now a media composer for film, television and games. Two years ago, she enrolled in a Master of Music program in film scoring at Berklee and has scored dozens of short films to date.

Burega works from home, where she has a studio, a computer with a piano keyboard, good speakers and headphones, and a lot of technology. She has also scored a number of public service announcements, including a recent PSA for the Emotional PPE Project, which provides emotional health resources for frontline workers during the pandemic.

Burega is currently scoring a video game that students at Harvard Extension created as well as a 40-minute Civil War documentary as part of her master’s thesis. “I’m not making it sound like it’s from the Civil War,” she said of the documentary. “The music is a bit more modern. That’s been a good way to go about it.”

Her advice for students who might be interested in film scoring is to watch a lot of films and break down what the music is doing and how it affects the scene. “Also, just start to compose and come up with different ideas,” she said. “Even performance experience is helpful. It can help you think of melodies when you’re writing.”

While Burega has found opportunities in her chosen field in the Boston area, Ben Wiseman, a 2013 CHS graduate, has been busy launching his career in New York City.

An aspiring writer and filmmaker, Wiseman majored in film production and minored in television at Brooklyn College and has been based in the NYC area ever since.

He has written a number of pilot scripts and screenplays, mostly comedies, and is hoping that one of his scripts will be picked up and produced, although the pandemic has affected television production in general. For the past five years Wiseman has been working in production management, and he recently landed a job as a locations manager for a film to be directed by Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco that stars a few Oscar-winning actors.

“I go around and try to scout locations for the film and then kind of just take care of the set when I’m working on the day,” Wiseman explained. The crew is filming all over Brooklyn, with some scenes being shot in Manhattan.

“It’s always different,” he said of his job, “but I do enjoy it. It’s a lot of networking. I never was a locations manager before, but I had a friend that needed someone and I ended up hopping on and it’s been going pretty well so far.” Wiseman has worked on the production of a wide range of films and television shows, including live events, awards shows, and music videos.

Ben Wiseman

Wiseman took classes in TV production at Canton High and was in the school band, but the impact of TV production teacher Ed McDonough is what he remembers most. “Really supporting the creativity of his students and really hammering how networking is so important really stands out,” he said. “And fostering and listening to what the students have to say. I was lucky with him. I kind of already knew what I wanted to do … and he fostered me more in supporting my ideas.”

Wiseman said his work has taught him the importance of being flexible and understanding people. “There’s always a solution to everything and people do want to help you out,” he said.

On the opposite coast in the media hotbed of Los Angeles, fellow CHS alum Amanda Berman has found a fulfilling career opportunity at the world-famous Getty Museum.

A 2009 CHS graduate, Berman majored in history and French at Hamilton College and went on to earn a master’s degree in museum studies from the Cooperstown Graduate program for Museum Studies at SUNY Oneonta.

In her role as a curatorial assistant in the Department of Sculpture and Decorative Arts, Berman uses French quite a bit. The Decorative Arts collection at the Getty is mostly French, with the primary sources for the collection in French.

Berman explained that curators “write the text that goes on the walls of an exhibition.” She also chooses artwork, writes articles about it, and puts together catalogues of exhibitions or collections. “My main job is collections-based research here, so I am keeping up to date on the latest scholarship related to our areas of collecting,” she said. “I’m doing a lot of research on our pieces specifically and their chain of ownership.”

Berman also handles social media posts for her department and is part of a diversity initiative at the Getty, which is dedicated to having bilingual texts in all of the galleries.

Berman said it takes about three years of research and work to prepare for an upcoming scheduled exhibition. At the present time, her department is working on an exhibition of works by French sculptor Camille Claudel that is set to open in 2024.

While Berman did not set out to be a museum curator, she has long had a love of history that was nurtured by her teachers at the Galvin Middle School and CHS. “I had a lot of great, great social sciences teachers,” she said. “There wasn’t a bad class.”

At Hamilton College, her on-campus work/study job was in the career development center, and she met regularly with career advisors to discuss her own career plans. She did a few internships at museums and discovered that she really enjoyed the work, but realized that she would need a master’s degree for a position as a curator.

Amanda Berman

Berman went on to work in the field of career development at Cornell University while saving money for graduate school. While studying for her master’s degree, she worked as a career advisor with undergraduate students at a local college. These days, she volunteers on her days off assisting low-income and formerly incarcerated people with their resumes and interview skills.

Berman said she thoroughly enjoys curatorial work and considers it a great match for her particular skillset. “It’s really rewarding to discover something about an artist that we didn’t know or a new owner for a piece that we didn’t know,” she said. “I love the work that I do on social media.”

Berman took an introductory TV course at CHS and had Ed McDonough for her homeroom teacher. She played flute in the band, sang in the chorus, and directed one-act plays. She also performed at local venues outside of school as part of a flute trio with two fellow CHS musicians.

Berman said her favorite class in high school was AP U.S. History with Pat Connor. She also did an independent study with Mr. Connor and helped him with one of his freshman history classes. “I still use some of the skills that I learned in AP U.S. History from Mr. Connor,” she said. “A lot of the document analysis skills he taught us for the AP exam are still valuable skills when I’m sifting through a bunch of documents trying to figure out what’s important.”

Berman’s advice for high school students is to keep in mind is that all experience is valuable. “Even if you work at a place and you don’t like it, it’s important to figure out what it is that you didn’t like about it,” she said. In addition to trying out new things, she advised students to keep in mind that people generally like to talk about themselves. “So you can ask someone who you think has a cool job if they want to talk to you about their job,” she said.

Berman added that young people sometimes think that they don’t have a network. However, she encouraged teenagers to keep in mind that they have their friends, parents, and the Internet to use as part of their network.

Burega, Wiseman and Berman are just a few of the many CHS graduates who are currently working in the arts or TV/film in markets throughout the country. Others include Dean Reddington, who is a web producer at CBSBoston.com; Roni Polsgrove, who is an independent filmmaker in Brooklyn; and Kyla Galer and Angelina Salcedo, who are both working as TV news anchors in Florida.

Additionally, Lauren Cortizo is the director of marketing at Netflix in Los Angeles; Elaine Loh is a writer, director and actor based in LA; Matt Chamberlain is a content producer at FOX Weather in Brooklyn; and Kevin Praik is an announcer for Canton Community Television.

McDonough regularly stays in contact with his former students and has invited many of them back to speak to his classes. He has also used his connections to set up tours and meet and greets with alumni during field trips to places such as New York and LA.

“I think that has made all the difference,” McDonough said. “It lets kids see behind the curtain in terms of what it’s like to be a professional before they leave high school.”

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