About Finnigan: His Story
My mission:
As an artist, I aspire to create work that explores the limits of human emotion and normalizes the exploration of sexuality and attraction. I aim to provide work that sparks essential conversations regarding the queer experience in this modern society and how that affects our development as people and artists.
My story:
Raised in the oceanside town of Santa Cruz, California, most of my free time as a child was spent running through the redwoods or looking for sea glass along the great Pacific. I found my love for the arts at an early age when I was cast in a community theater’s production of Peter Pan. As an 8 year old, I found there to be really no difference between running through the woods and playing a lost boy on the stage. They were both “play” to me.
As a child, I studied at West Performing Arts, where we created our own scripts from novels we loved. I played brass in the Santa Cruz Youth Symphony for several years, where an appreciation for some of our world’s greatest composers was fostered in me, as well as a foundation in music theory. A combination of both experimental theater and orchestral work taught me the elements that make up what it takes to create quality work from scratch and the value of ensemble.
I later graduated a year early from high school and moved to Philadelphia at 17 to study theater at the University of the Arts. It was during my freshman year that I picked up songwriting to help me cope with the transition and being so far away from home. These tunes later turned into my first fully composed song cycle, “San Francisco Daydream,” that had a university workshop during February 2020, and concept album. My focus quickly shifted from the performing side of theater and more to writing. I started studying privately under Broadway composer Drew Gasparini, and taught myself guitar and piano over the pandemic. In August of 2021, I moved to New York City for the opportunity to workshop Catching Fireflies: A New Queer Musical, a little show I spent all of quarantine writing about my queer journey that turned in a my first full-length musical. After two concert workshops, we recorded a full length cast album at Lorien Sound in Brooklyn produced by my good friend James Rubino, and the show will soon be making its fully-staged production debut in January 2025 (more info on that soon!) In addition to theater writing. I’m also pursuing a solo indie folk career, with my debut solo single, “Little Prince” dropping last October. My dream would be to have Catching Fireflies in theaters while I could tour my folk music across the country. :)
As a young queer individual growing in our modern society, I aspire to create work that explores the limits of human emotion and normalizes the exploration of sexuality and attraction. I aim to provide work that sparks essential conversations regarding the queer experience and how that affects our development as people and artists. Yet despite this, I still want to maintain that element of “play” that drew me to the arts in the first place, no matter what. <3