About Leila

Leila Bruske is based in NYC and is a graduate of Emory & Henry College having earned her BFA in Musical Theatre in 2022. She is a native of Washington, DC, where she discovered her love of theatre seeing productions at the Folger Theatre and Kennedy Center, as well as acting in her fifth grade production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (a high she has yet to come down from). When she was 13 years old her family moved to a tiny town in upstate New York. The move forced her love of theatre to flourish as the high school drama club was, quite literally, the only thing to do. Seriously, this town has one traffic light. (She says this with all the love in the world).

Leila’s love of musical theatre can be traced back to 2001 when she was gifted a VHS copy of The Sound of Music; it was the first film she ever saw, and has remained her favorite of all time. She is a self proclaimed history geek and is often referred to as “a walking musical theatre encyclopedia”- she channeled this into her senior project, and spent her last year at Emory & Henry curating her solo show: Watch What Happens: A History of Broadway Musical Theatre Through Song. Although she loves and celebrates all genres of the musical theatre canon, her true passion lies in defending the integrity and relevance of the Golden Age. The chair of the Emory & Henry Theatre Department has coined her “a feminist scholar of Golden Age musicals”.

When she takes off her actor’s hat you can find Leila in the kitchen, playing with her cat, Blue, or working on her latest project: watching all of the movies on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest films of all time. Her current favorites are Some Like it Hot, Bonnie and Clyde, and (in a shocking turn of events), The Godfather.