Gemma Winter is 24 years young with a birthday on February 25th. She hails from Kettering, Northamptonshire, England but now lives in New York, New York. She is a Dramaturg and Part-Time Waitress and looks a bit like Ella Purnell.
+ Determined
+ brave
+ generous
- Jaded
- skeptical
- private
triggers: Death, bigamy, homelessness, mugging, disability
Gemma Winter was born in Kettering, a town she’d heard someone refer to as “Rose of the Shires,” but her own sense of the place was less kind. It wasn’t that Kettering was bad so much as it was boring, at least in her mind, and she couldn’t wait to get out. It only took ten years.
As a young child, she was raised by her widowed grandfather. There was never much discussion about what had happened to her parents, but she knew she’d never meet them, never get to know the people who actually created her. And that was fine with Gemma most of the time, if only because her grandfather was a pretty cool guy. He taught her a lot about history, about maps and the world they revealed. When he passed away, it was a loss she took hard.
And then she learned what had happened to her parents. Her mother had intended to raise her alone. Her father, a bigamist with another family, had left her to be with them. But her mother died in childbirth, and rather than contacting Gemma’s father, her grandfather had taken over the duties of raising her. After he died, Gemma found herself in her father’s home, surrounded by his family: a stepmom and two half siblings she didn’t especially like. It was surreal, and it made Gemma angry.
It wasn’t long before Gemma ran away, fleeing to Manchester at the age of 17, finding odd jobs here and there to support herself. She crashed on people’s couches, slept in shelters and on the street. When she found a job decent enough to support her, she moved into the cheapest place she could find, purchasing furniture one bit at a time. It was then that she decided she wanted to go to university. She’d done her A levels before running off, and she wanted to study history. Or theater. History of theater? She wasn’t certain, but she knew she wanted an education.
Attending University of Manchester, she tried to pursue both at first, but found that it was a lot to handle between the work she did to get by and trying to study two subjects. She learned about dramaturgy, which seemed like a way to focus on history and theater both, but all within the realm of a drama degree. After Manchester, she moved to London, now with two roommates, and attended Central School of Speech and Drama, getting her Master’s in Dramaturgy. She was offered a job in New York while she worked on her PhD, and she took it, moving there alone.
Gemma wasn’t scared of much, and New York by herself wasn’t intimidating at all. She couldn’t afford to move in to the greatest neighborhood, but she felt safe enough. That feeling of safety was shattered when she was mugged, leaving her with bruises that took forever to heal and a knee injury that meant using a cane to walk. But she was undeterred, and she continued to work as Dramaturg for Circle in the Square Theater, continued to pursue her PhD from Columbia University. She might need pain medication to get through the day, but that wasn’t going to stop her from achieving her goals.
