At least once in our lives, we’ve come across a charismatic, magnetic child and we think “Oh, they’re going to be a performer!” This is the case for the parents and family of Bahni Turpin, who is now an award-winning audiobook narrator and actress with a career spanning nearly four decades.
As a child born and raised in Pontiac, Michigan, Turpin would command the attention of guests at her parents’ parties. “I would come out at parties and read…it was a party trick! I am the youngest of my family, I have three siblings, and [everybody] read to me. I was definitely the kid that snuck out in the middle of the night to get books!” Her avid bookworm tendencies would soon catapult her as an artist and a student, even leading her to skip a grade.
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Her love for stories carried through to adolescence. At nine years old, Turpin began studying acting every weekend at Will-O-Way Apprentice Theater. Passions grew and skills were honed, and at seventeen, Turpin was off to Howard University to study Theater. After a couple of years, she found NYU Tisch to be a better fit and was accepted as a transfer student into their renowned acting conservatory.
New York City gave Turpin a new world of opportunities, including the privileges of training at The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and the Lee Theatre & Film Strasberg Institute. As is the case with so many talented artists, Turpin did have to hustle through the sacrificial ‘struggling artist’ period in her early twenties. However, she quickly found her footing and began booking acting jobs around the city.
By 1989, Turpin was filming her acting debut in Julie Dash’s movie Daughters of the Dust. After years of garnering more credits and joining SAG-AFTRA, Turpin moved to Los Angeles in 2005 to dive deeper into film and television.
By divine chance, her first year in L.A. proved to be a turning point in three life-changing areas of her life: she met her husband, joined the Cornerstone Theater Company (where she is currently celebrating her nineteenth year), and unknowingly began her career in audiobook narration.
While rehearsing a play, a fellow actress gave Turpin the information for an audiobook narrator audition. Turpin decided to follow through with an audition and within a few months had her first booking. After only five years, Turpin had been nominated for and won multiple Audie and Earphone Awards, and in 2018 she was inducted into the Audible Narrator Hall of Fame.
Turpin values narration because “you get to play multiple characters, and sometimes play a lot of different characters that you don’t get to play on screen”. She also argues that narration is acting; memorizing, reading to understand characters, developing their backstory, and making choices about how the character speaks are all a part of a great actor’s methodology. In this way, her career in narration and acting have complimented and strengthened one another.
At the peak of her career, she is looking forward to the opportunities ahead. Having accomplished so much, she says there’s only one more thing to do: “be a movie star!” Thinking back to Turpin as that charismatic child captivating audiences in her parents’ home, it’s clear that she is not far from stardom.
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IG: @BahniTurpin
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