Mim Paquin is an actor, singer, writer and composer. The fourth child of five children, Mim Paquin was born as MaryAnne Leslie Paquin on January 24, 1974 in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to Leslie Jane (Nekuda) and Pierre Arnold Paquin. Her mother was a substitute special education teacher. She was a political science major, and studied classical voice, as well as acting at Gateway. Her father was a foreign languages high school teacher, live orchestral audio-engineer, and radio announcer and broadcaster. He was a foreign languages & theology major who focused on broadcasting, theater and music. Her father is an avid classical music listener and her mother is an avid reader. Both parents were semi-professional actors, singers and stage directors. She grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts and spent summer vacations in Clinton, Massachusetts with her maternal grandmother, Eileen Ann (O'Malley) Nekuda and her grand uncle William Joseph O'Malley. Mim uses her nickname as her stage name because her birth name, "MaryAnne," has too many variant spellings. Mim's ancestry includes Irish, Welsh, English, Scottish, Czech, German, French Canadian, Acadian, Mi'kmaq, Pawnee, and Metis. Mim is a fifth-generation performer. As an actress, BackstageNY (Jessica Daniels) reviewed Mim as having "a heart of gold". As a singer, OperaNews' senior editor, Louise Guinter described her as "brilliant"! This multifaceted artist with a full four-and-a-half-octave vocal range (A2-Eb6), began performing on stage in musicals and plays at age four, and has performed in over 50 fully-staged play & musical productions, and over one hundred orchestral and choral concerts. At the early age of four, Mim began acting, singing and dancing in musical theatre productions. Her first stage role was as the youngest of the royal children in The King and I, co-directed by her parents at Fairhaven High School in Massachusetts. Audio-engineering was the family business. Her father listened to classical orchestral music every single day. Mim, along with her siblings, began apprenticing with her father on both symphonic recording and theater amplification jobs. She started learning this skill when she was eight years old. At the age of thirteen, Mim became a professional church soloist. From age eight to eighteen, she performed in the ensemble and had lead roles in eight New Bedford High School's New England Theatre Conference and Moss Hart Award-winning stage musical productions. Roles include: (Brigitta in The Sound of Music; Annie in Annie; The Music Man; My Fair Lady; Camelot; City Her in The Gifts of the Magi; Nancy in Oliver!; Mrs. Cratchit in Scrooge; Maria, Duchess of Dene in Me and My Girl. Mim was highly active in New Bedford High School's award winning music department, performing in six select concert choirs and show choir, as well as occasionally stepping in as a rehearsal conductor. Her senior year of high school she won the soprano solo at the Massachusetts All-States Music Conference. She performed in, choreographed and directed local plays and musical productions, and sang in local professional orchestra choruses. At age seventeen, with the encouragement of her father, she wrote, narrated, engineered and produced a series of hour-long children's classical music radio programs for WFCC 107. 5 FM on Cape Cod, for which she won an honorable mention Massachusetts Broadcasters Award. She and her father won the first place Massachusetts Broadcasters Award for her voice over work on WFCC's station identification commercial produced by her father. After graduating from New Bedford High School with music and drama scholarships, she waited a year, working and saving money in order to attend a conservatory. She performed with local theater productions: UMass Dartmouth Symphony (Porgy & Bess) and Marion Art Centre (Desiree Armfeldt in A Little Night Music), and in a stylistically diverse variety of well-known musical groups: Ecclesia Consort of New England, United House of Prayer Gospel Choir, and the New Orleans Jazz Connection. After a successful audition, she went on to the acclaimed musical theatre program at The Boston Conservatory with a full-scholarship. She attended for a year, all the while further developing her interest in writing, composing and producing her own original music with the encouragement of academic peers from neighboring Berklee College of Music. After a year, she left the conservatory and worked full-time for a year while maintaining her acting studies at Boston Baked Theatre in Cambridge with author of AUDITION, Michael Shurtleff, and with Andrea Southwick at The Southwick Studio. She successfully auditioned for Berklee College of Music as a voice major and composition major, and received a half-scholarship with eight semesters to decide to attend.
