Catherine “Catie” Sands is known around campus for being the president of the Neumann Players.
“I wanted to become president to help make theatre more popular and allow people to know it’s not just wrapped in cellophane.”
Usually, you will find her playing one of the leading roles. She was Roz in 9 to 5, Lefou in Beauty and the Beast, and Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Her most recent role is Nina in The Seagull.
Catie is also a member of NU Praise, jazz band, and a peer educator as well as a member of Knightflix. She hopes to make more films with Knightflix and possibly host her own radio show.
She’s most known for her sense of fashion, and you’re likely to see her wearing a doodle bob hat from SpongeBob SquarePants—her creativity and ability to bring a character to life help her stand out.
Catie’s main focus is theatre, which she started doing in 8th grade. However, she started taking it seriously in high school.
The idea of being on stage drove her to do theatre. She could be someone else for a little while and forget all the problems “Catie” was battling at that moment. She has dealt with a lot of stuff throughout her life, but theatre was her safe space. It helped her get away.
Her favorite part of theatre is the community it brings; she believes it allows her to be her most authentic self.
The thing that first drove her interest in theater was her love for characters like Mary Poppins and WALL-E. She also loved The Wizard of Oz as she always considered herself to be Dorothy and her cat, Jingles, to be Toto.
Her love for movies is what drove her love for musicals. Eventually, she moved on to writing stories on her mom’s computer and telling stories to her grandmother as a kid.
Catie was born in Philadelphia but raised in Pittsgrove, New Jersey, since the age of three. She lives with her mom, Caroline, and older brother, Tim.
Her parents split up when she was three and her relationship with her father is strange. He would leave his children home with no food and have violent episodes with his kids in the house.
Eventually, he would start to self-medicate. On New Year’s Eve, when Catie was just nine years old, he tried to take his life with kids in the house.
The biggest struggle Catie faces is her autism. Her story of how she got diagnosed was a rollercoaster in itself.
Catie says she was first diagnosed with autism around the age of three; however, she was undiagnosed at the age of 9. After getting therapy at the age of 17 for problems she was facing with her father, the therapist helped to diagnose her.
Autism isn’t her only struggle.
She has hypoplastic right heart syndrome and has had to undergo three open heart surgeries to help fix it, starting at two days old, and then at six months. Her latest one was at two.
The one mission Catie has anywhere she goes is to leave every place better than she found it. She wants people to know she is more than just her struggles and not to think they know the entire story from the page they walked in on.
Catie is hoping to one day win an Oscar for script writing or directing. She is hoping to do so by changing the sigma the television world gives people with disabilities.
