Acting 

ABOUT OUR ACTING TEACHER:

MS. HUNTER PARKER is an award-winning theatre director who has produced and directed numerous productions up and down the East Coast, including off-Broadway. Recent favorites include Anything Goes, Our Town, Les Misérables, The Tempest, Frozen, Footloose, Next to Normal, and The Last Five Years. She enjoys acting too, most recently performing as Barbara in August: Osage County at Chestnut Street Playhouse. After earning a BA in Acting from Virginia Tech (Go Hokies!), she completed a national tour in children’s theater, worked briefly in Los Angeles, and returned to her home state of Virginia to begin teaching and directing high schoolers, where she was recognized as both Teacher of the Year and Regional Theatre Director of the Year during her tenure. Hunter received a fellowship from The University of Georgia (Go Dawgs!), and relocated to Athens, GA to earn her MFA in Theatre. She’s worked for many esteemed nonprofits, including Hartford Stage, Virginia Repertory Theatre, and SPARC (Richmond, VA). 

Locally, she’s taught at Hartford Stage, Eastern, USJ, and Hall High School before coming to Conard in the fall of 2021, where she teaches acting to freshmen through seniors, advises the Improv Clubs and Thespians, and directs the Fall and Spring Plays along with the Conard Musical. She loves teaching and directing at Conard and is proud of the numerous award nominations and wins by her students over the years for their performances in school plays and musicals, including several Best Actress and Actor nominations and a national Jimmy Award finalist in 2024! The Black Box plays she directs frequently receive accolades, including the state's Halo Award for Best Classical Play for Our Town and The Tempest. The musicals are nominated for various Sondheim Awards and her students have performed at The Shubert Theatre in New Haven three times as a finalist in the Best Musical category for Les Misérables, Frozen, and Footloose. In 2022, she was honored to receive the Stephen Sondheim Award for Best Direction of a Musical (Footloose). In 2023, Conard won the national United States of Frozen contest which allowed her to conceive and direct the inaugural production of Disney's FROZEN the musical in the state of Connecticut. In 2024, her students performed music from Frozen live on Good Morning America alongside students from around the country. In the summer of 2025, she was able to take 20 Conard students to the UK, where they premiered an original student-written comedy called MURDER AT CAMP HARMONY at the Fringe festival in Edinburgh, Scotland to rave reviews. 

Her passion for theatre and social justice has taken her to rural Tanzania for the past fifteen years, where she is a Co-founder of New Hope School for Girls, a secondary boarding school that opened in 2023 and was recently named a top 80 school in the nation. She resides in town with her sweet dog Berkley (@barkswithberkie) and is grateful to call West Hartford and Conard home.