Karen Pittman is a renaissance woman. While you may know her from her roles in two hit series, she actually entered the entertainment industry as an opera singer.
“Singing was always sort of natural for me,” Pittman tells ESSENCE. “I always sang. I came out of the womb, singing.” She actually worked in the music industry for years before she realized that the business overruled the art.
“I just felt very burdened by the desire to be artistically sound and the music industry wanted to make money. There was no marriage between money and art. And so it was only a few years after I moved to New York City.”
Pittman moved to pursue another childhood passion: acting, or what she calls dramatic play.
“A lot of that was because my parents were really struggling to be happy together,” Pittman explains. “I was pained by their emotional challenges and their experience. So I would go in my room and I would try to find a way, a creative way to express my sadness and my anxiety over it.”
In New York, Pittman was pregnant and looking for a way to remain connected to entertainment.
“I ended up auditioning for NYU grad school, about four or five months pregnant at the time, which I don’t think anybody had done, at the time. They asked me to enroll, to my surprise. Well not so surprised…”
Having the audacity to audition for a prestigious graduate program while pregnant, speaks to a belief in oneself and also Pittman’s penchant for risk-taking. Taking risks was one of the reasons she signed on to portray a new character in the follow-up series to the beloved Sex and the City franchise.
“I will be rolling the dice on certain things,” Pittman said of herself. “That’s just naturally who I am. I like to work on original ideas and I like collaborators who are interested in telling a really daring, original…
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