Shawnee is one of those rare Los Angeles natives. As a young girl of the suburbs, she found escape in the world’s of her imagination, always wanting to play in the pretend. After graduating high school and community college with various honors, accidentally earning 5 Associate’s Degree’s Cum Laude and Magna Cum Laude, and receiving admissions offers from both UCLA for English and UC Berkeley for Political Science, she instead chose to follow her heart and pursue her passion: acting.

A lover of both stage and screen work, Shawnee chose California Institute of the Arts, one of the top drama schools in the world, for her BFA in Acting with a minor in Creative Writing. In between auditions, theatre rehearsals and performances, she also works in entertainment at the Disneyland Resort, portraying many of your favorites.

Alongside performance, she is also passionate about advocating for human rights, animal rights, and environmental justice. Shawnee made history when she authored and passed both a resolution and language into the 2018 California Democratic Party Platform pertaining to the importance of the education and promotion of plant-based living, as animal agriculture is a leading driver of our climate crisis. Her vegan resolution was the first to pass a major state political party in the United States and her amendment to the platform made the California Democratic Party the first major state party platform in the country to include language emphasizing the importance of a plant-based lifestyle. Her work was the first time veganism was discussed at all within the California Democratic Party and she is credited with inspiring her dear friend, Assemblymember Ash Kalra’s ACR 279, a similar resolution which passed through the California Legislature.

In 2020, Shawnee was awarded with the Los Angeles County Democratic Party Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Democrat of the Year Award. In 2022, she was named a 40 Under Forty honoree.

Shawnee has worked as a published model (Elle Girl Japan, Vogue Italia, and much more). Her other passions include climbing mountains, figure skating, playing Dungeons and Dragons, painting, kayaking, pottery, writing poetry, dancing, strumming her guitar and banging on the drums, running and rock climbing. Her adventurous spirit has led her across the finish line of the Los Angeles Marathon, to the summits of some of the tallest mountains in Southern California, including climbing the tallest mountain in the contiguous United States—Mt. Whitney, to base camp on active volcano and the U.S.’s most glaciered peak, Mt. Rainier, and across the arctic circle to gaze upon the Northern Lights.