Celena Maye is most adept at delivering voices of authority, comfort, earthiness, sincerity and trust. She is a corporate professional yet can deliver with a sassy, urban flair. She wants to inspire and motivate, entertain, encourage and educate with her voice and talent.
"Be yourself," the director said, and Celena replied, "Which one?" There is the studious, church-going former Girl Scout raised in the Midwest by parents from the South, where she went to a small college and to work in a very large and conservative corporation. Women dressed to code in dark colors, wore hose at all times, closed-toe pumps, and pearls. They were prim, polished, professional and in their places, and so was she. However, the rebel in her would emerge occasionally to challenge the status quo, rock a few boats, and push an envelope or two as she ascended "the ladder."
Often the class clown and the life of the party, Celena harnessed all that creative energy and expressed herself artistically, at first, through church drama, and then via an acclaimed one-woman lecture-performance that she wrote and performs, as well as a teleplay, stage plays, a few commercial and industrial voiceovers and on-camera PSA's. She was also a stage mom to her young son, did keynote speaking, and of course, corporate training wearing those dark, closed-toe pumps.
A bibliophile and voracious reader, she is a self-described "edutainer," because she loves to teach through entertaining. For her oratorical skills, Celena has been called a modern day Sojourner Truth, a female Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr; and she's been likened to speaker and former magazine editor Susan L. Taylor. Her dramatizations have evoked the name of actress CCH Pounder, and her recitations, poet Maya Angelou. Now that's great company, but she does not feel worthy of such comparisons; nonetheless she is appreciative and strives to live up to them.
Celena is also an athlete and has played competitive sports most of her life. A mother of one son, she is adventurous and curious, too. With him in tow often, she has traveled six continents and visited over 15 countries, and lived in seven cities in four states, including Southern California just outside of Los Angeles. She'd like to rest there a while because she just loves the beauty, variety, diversity, and a climate conducive to playing golf and tennis outdoors all year round.
No longer confined to that conservative corporation, Celena now says, "I'm free to be me, whatever that may be." It does not matter what she wears as a voice talent, so occasionally, you will find her strolling on the wild side in bright colors, leather clothes, leopard pumps with opened-toes, and bare legs. She is keeping the pearls, though, because diamonds aren't a girl's only best friends; and prim, polished and professional are okay sometime, depending on which self she is being that day. Whichever, Celena is living with purpose and passion, illuminating the world with her God-gifted voice and talent, living up to the meaning of her name, which is "bringer of light."
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