Glenn Burnett

Glenn Robert Anthony Burnett was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Patricia Burnett (née DeChirico) and Ardith Eugene Burnett, a former naval serviceman who worked in the aerospace and aeronautical engineering industry. He grew up on Long Island in a predominantly Italian American family. His Scotch father was raised in the Midwest. His mother was born and raised a first generation Italian American in Brooklyn, New York. Glenn grew up in a loving yet broken home, which he left at the age of seventeen to spend his first college semester in upstate New York. He moved to Florida with family after a mostly unproductive academic semester, and worked a couple of restaurant jobs while he continued to recover his academic standing. He took a public speaking course after having previously enjoyed competing on academic stages. He did well in school, and added a telemarketing job to his experience. He performed cold calling where he used his experience as an early practice in character study. After a year in Florida, Glenn returned to Long Island to live, work, and continue his studies. He enrolled in acting and writing classes, as well as a stagecraft class while working long hours as a security guard to help pay his tuition. Burnett continued his acting studies and received recognition within the school's theatre department. Shortly after his time in school he bought a guitar and starting to teach himself to read basic chord charts. He and another schoolmate began hanging around playing guitar together. Burnett recalls driving around in his Thunderbird with his pal in the passenger seat playing guitar while driving around looking for places to set up and play in public. He also spent a lot of his free time writing creatively. Eventually Glenn would leave school and New York to travel west to Washington state where he would continue to act, play music, and perform some of his original writings on stage. In his mid-twenties he competed in the Seattle Poetry Slam competition and took second place performing mostly a diverse set of character-based monologues. He briefly played in a couple of upstart bands while working his way around various restaurant jobs. He wanted to learn as much as he could about working in restaurants. So, he's worked kitchen roles as a dishwasher, prep cook, line cook, sautée and pantry station, as well as front of the house as a busser, server, runner, bar back, and coat check clerk. His time in restaurants served him well. One day while he and a few friends were spending a day at a northern Idaho lake, he and a friend threw a several hundred pound log into a lake. A bystander offered him a job on an iron-working project for the effort. For the sake of playing a new role, he accepted and worked the next few months as a welder's assistant, laying aluminum decking out on the roof of a 4-story warehouse structure and running welding lead cables across joists and girders high above the ground. His co-workers were a stark contrast to his former restaurant co-workers. This gave Burnett an appreciation for the gritty hard working construction types, the kind that would make the Coen brothers proud. This project ended and Burnett returned to restaurant work in Seattle, helping a couple of new restaurants get their franchises started. By this time Burnett was looking for a new scene. Burnett made a couple of appearances in the late nite improv scene while living in Seattle. In a major career move, after several years in the food and beverage industry, he transitioned into temporary office work. He wanted to understand what different industries were doing behind the scenes to serve customers. After several contracts in banking, investments, biochemistry, and the bio-medical industries, he took a long term job in the nascent wireless telecommunications industry. He worked in a call center and talked to a lot of people, helping them set-up phone accounts, equipment features, and business services. In his work, he studied consumer behaviors throughout various verticals, conducting business services through local, regional, and national markets. He studied cultural communications in various industries and cultural types. In all, he took over 100,000 phone calls, interacting with general consumers, individuals, heads of household and eventually to business and government operations personnel. As he tells this story, he notes that his success in the call center traces back to something his acting coach from college on Long Island told him in his first acting coursework. She told them, "If you expect to get work in this industry, you have to lose the accent." He took that to mean that there are only so many roles available for films like "The Godfather" and there are many more trained actors in New York than there are roles that require the New York accent. Unless he detected a New York accent on one of his nationally sourced business calls, he would speak without one. After a decade in the now saturated field of wireless telecom, Burnett received a phone call that would change his future dramatically. With this new information, he decided to accept an offer from his employer to leave the company, rather than move to Utah where its call center was relocating its operations group. He returned to college for three years to study business and marketing management for use in the growing startup environment. He concentrated on project management and entrepreneurship, learned the lingo, and engaged a strong campus network, including a stint as the student government president's chief of staff. His immersion in school was partly driven by a will to produce a family story that required a great deal of organization as well as his enjoyment of the academic life. Many of his classes required group projects and presentations. Occasionally his group project mates were apprehensive about public speaking. Burnett would help manage their project in ways that strategically solved their nervousness. He happily took the lead on these presentation projects to continue to improve his own shortcomings. He had already developed an interest in presentation that would serve himself and others well. Burnett found himself in multiple short film projects during this time. He was seeking student volunteers to help him produce a introduction video for a startup he had co-founded with new friends in the business community. One day while sitting in on a meeting to that would help introduce him to digital media student on campus, he offered to volunteer for a project they were preparing for, a 48 Hour Film Project competition. He took what he thought might be a quick study position as Second AC / Slate person. He was hoping to sit in with the writers while they brainstormed the impromptu script. This role quickly turned into an on-camera role as an undercover federal agent, which Burnett was required to improvise most of his scene. This was the first in a string of other short film pieces, which all occurred in a short span. He worked on another 48HFP in a horror genre, then as a small supporting role as another undercover officer for a production that was being led by an international film star. While on that set performing unit production management duties, he was approached by a crew member who was planning a film project of his own. He was asked to play the title role in this independent short film. Once filming was done and he had completed his two associate's degrees, and after suspending his startup business' R&D cycle, he went to New York to continue research on an epic family story. During his first year he learned that the short film he had acted in had been accepted into two film festivals in the Seattle-Tacoma area. As of 2017, he was splitting his time between New York and the Seattle area while he continues to make progress on his personal project. He continues to pitch and develop his radical life story. Most recently, he auditioned and was called in to work as a background actor on an upcoming miniseries set in northern New York. The story chronicles a maximum security prison break that actually happened only one year before his move to a small village in the North Country of the Adirondacks, and with a hour drive of the prison. The timing couldn't be better as Burnett continued to add credits to his acting resume. Burnett was adopted when he was eight months old and credits this fact with his interest in meeting new people and enjoying the challenges that accompany change. He believes this is also why he's enjoyed playing various sports growing up. Burnett once played backup quarterback, receiver, free safety, punter, and kickoff special teams on various teams in the football minor leagues, including a team that was coached by a then-current Super Bowl champion defensive tackle. He was selected as a league all star at the punter position. Burnett is no stranger to athletics. He has also been selected to all star teams in various sports including football, baseball, and basketball. He has also competing academically in grade school, in math and spelling, and in college in business law and ethics. He was trained in several sports, which he says provided a great deal of physical, intellectual, and emotional range and control. He played a dozen years as a baseball shortstop, competed in high school varsity tennis, has played basketball, and hockey as well. Between ages 10 - 13 he was selected amongst his classmates to compete in his school's spelling and math bees. He never reached the final rounds, but never got eliminated in the opening round. He was happy to just be standing on stage answering questions that must have been important enough for him to do it in front of an auditorium full of students and teachers. Burnett believes there is a bit of absurdity in some of his accomplishments, saying that sometimes as an adoptee he felt he was doing things to humor those who felt these events and competitions were worthwhile pursuits. Ultimately, he values those who took a chance on him, as without these chances he wouldn't have enjoyed life as richly.