Wendy Keeling

Bloomington to Chicago to Key West to Nashville to the Florida coast.

Wendy Keeling grew up in Bloomington, Illinois, drawn to anything and everything creative, from performing to the visual arts. She started acting as a child in local theater and fell in love with the stage. She also has an extensive background in music, playing alto sax among other woodwinds and serving as drum major in both high school and college. Many assumed music would be the career. An itch to be on stage led her to Chicago instead, where she took acting classes, modeled, and worked at an improv theater for years.

Then she moved to the islands. Wendy spent many years in Key West, the place she calls home. She bartended for a living and worked at the local college in the art department, and the free thinking island life became a natural fit. It was there she became an accomplished multimedia artist, working with ceramics, stone, paint, wood, metal, and glass. Basically anything she could get her hands into and get dirty. Her work tends toward the sculptural and abstract, and she seldom stays clean in the studio for long.

A chance meeting led to a couple of commercials, which led to an international marketing campaign for a documentary that debuted at the Showtime Room at the Sundance Film Festival. That was the beginning of the other side of Wendy: the production side.

She found her way back to acting in Nashville, drawn to complex characters and the chance to play a broad age and character range. She also began writing, directing, and producing her own projects, and has become an award winning director and producer. Today she lives just outside Jacksonville near Amelia Island, where she continues her artwork, acting, and filmmaking, and co-founded and served as Creative Director for the Loudoun Arts Film Festival in Virginia.