Zaiesha Joseph

Ever since she was a child she wanted to become an actress. Zaiesha remembers standing in the classroom in front of 15 students or sometimes even in front of her entire school assembly performing monologues, some of which she had made up on the spot. She remembers telling her classmates that she is going to become a professional actress one day, she also remembers her classmates doubting her, but that never deterred her because she knew she had a true passion for acting. “I have always loved acting!” Whenever the electricity was working, Zaiesha would watch bootleg CD movies on the DVD player and imagine herself playing a certain role or character. “I could see myself very vividly on the Television”. Zaiesha’s mother’s mother worked in the cane fields, as did her mother until the untimely closing of the sugar manufacturing industry. Her father was a construction worker until his unfortunate death in 2007, since then her mother has been a single parent, supplementing the household income by knitting and crocheting local products which are sold to tourists who visit her beautiful Island. She is the seventh of nine siblings and all her life she has been living ‘hand to mouth’ “I truly know what it is like to go hungry, sometimes for days at a time”. From as early as she can remember, Zaiesha decided that that is not the future she wants for herself and focused on achieving academic excellence at school. In High School and College, she tried her best to choose subjects that wo…