Welcome to our new interns!

Lifeline welcomes two new interns…

Georgia Knapp, who will be with us through June.

Georgia was born in England, grew up in Guantanamo Cuba, then lived in Germany for a couple years (where she learned the language) before her family settled in St. Simon’s Island, Georgia. She notes that she was named Georgia long before her family moved to the state that shares her name. St. Simon’s Island has a land mass of 17 square miles and she reports that it is easily walkable in a day. Georgia was an English with an Emphasis on Creative Writing Major at Kalamazoo College (spending time in their Study Abroad program in Aberdeen, Scotland). She has also worked as a park ranger for the National Park Service at Ford Frederica National Monument (the first colony settled in Georgia) and then in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Before arriving in Chicago, she also spent some time working on Mackinac Island, Michigan. Most recently, Georgia finished an internship at Northlight Theatre in Evanston and at Lifeline she is assisting in administration, front-of-house, marketing, development and production areas as well as participating in the Lifeline Storytelling Project as a writer and performer. Georgia also recently had a creative non-fiction piece (The Marshes of Glynn) published in the Fall 2011 e-zine, The Smoking Poet. Post-Lifeline, Georgia hopes to find a paying job in theater (though she also retains high interest in the park service as well as the fields of publishing and free-lance editing). Georgia has a life-long ambition to meet a real moose and the photo below is as close as she’s gotten thus far: taken on one of her many travel adventures, this one near Pancake Bay in Ontario.

And Julie Wiltjer, who comes to Lifeline thru the Chicago Semester program and will be with us full-time into May.

Julie grew up in Worth, Illinois, about a half-hour outside Chicago and credits her older sister for sparking her interest in theater. Julie became active in theater in middle school, while also being on the soccer, basketball and track teams. She briefly abandoned theater in high school to focus on her athletic pursuits, but in her junior year she decided she missed and preferred theater and dropped sports to return to the stage. Julie is now a senior theater major and music minor at Trinity Christian College and will graduate in May upon completion of her internship at Lifeline. When at home, Julie drives a 1999 Ford Contour named Bella but she is enjoying this trial run of living car-less in Chicago and finding her way around on the CTA system. Though Julie doesn’t have GPS on her phone, she has a foolproof and personal GPS system in her dad, who is a garbage truck driver in Chicago. She can call him from any location and be assured of his immediate ability to identify her coordinates and best path to her destination. Julie recently played Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at school, where she also enjoys singing in honors choir. Theater now counts as Julie’s main sport, though she also likes hanging out with friends and playing board games, confessing a serious addiction to the game of Clue. Julie looks forward to moving permanently to Chicago post-college and seeking jobs in and around the theater scene. While at Lifeline she is assisting in the front-of-house, marketing, development and production areas, as well as participating in the Lifeline Storytelling Project.