Stage actress Eve Passeltiner ’85 also has a busy career doing voice-over work and audiobook narration. “You get to be all of these people you might not get cast as in-person,” she says.
Eve Passeltiner ’85 has probably told you a story. You just didn’t know it at the time.
Since leaving Haverford with a biology degree, Passeltiner’s career in the arts has included founding a repertory theater company in Utah; creating fused glass art available for sale in New England galleries; starring in stage shows throughout the Northeast; and, most recently, adding the narration of audiobooks to her voice-over bona fides.
She’s been the voice behind advertisements for Blue Cross and Comcast, played the French freedom fighter Tricolour in a video game, and created Dari-Pashto accented voices for The Washington Post’s multimedia feature “The Women of Kabul.”
"The best narrators know how to create and sustain characters and tell a story,” said Passeltiner, who works under her own name as well as a pseudonym. “It’s not just about the words or saying them nicely. It’s not enough to have a good voice; you have to be alive.”
Since adding audiobooks to her resume four years ago, Passeltiner has guided listeners through nonfiction works about losing belly fat and balancing chakras; she has given life to fictional characters including a female political strategist and her philandering ex-husband, a Scottish lord, British ladies, Italian maids, and an Irish rogue.
"You get to be all of these people you might not get cast as in-person,” she said. “The spoken word has power. It can heal, educate, comfort, inspire.”
Passeltiner, who grew up watching her actor parents on stage, began performing in middle school. She wanted to be an actor, but she didn’t want to major in theater.
"As an actor, you want to know about different things. Science is a language. You have a hypothesis, you test it out. In rehearsal, you’re exploring. ‘What if I do this? How does this impact the experience?’ ” said Passeltiner, who played field hockey, basketball, and lacrosse at Haverford. “It’s the same with sports. You practice together, you play together. The more interested and engaged you are in all parts of the world, the better you are at doing anything.”
Passeltiner recently starred as Annie Cannon in Silent Sky, a play based on the true story of female scientists at Harvard Observatory in the early 1900s who long went unrecognized. She’ll play Scottish astronomer Williamina Fleming when Silent Sky runs in Raleigh, N.C., later this year.
"They were the mothers of astronomy, and people don’t know the stories,” Passeltiner said. “It’s made me want to do more audiobooks written by women or about women.”
