Sarah Culberson

When she was one year old, Sarah Culberson was adopted by a West Virginia couple. She attended graduate school at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, and moved to Los Angeles in 2001 to pursue an acting career. When she was 28 years old, she sought out her birth parents and learned that she was a princess - the daughter of the chief of Bumpe, a farming village in the southern province of Sierra Leone. Her biological mother had been a college student in West Virginia, and later died of cancer. Her father's country had been ravaged by civil war, and despite his royal title, her parents were too poor to raise her. When she located her father, Joseph Konia Kposowa, he invited her to Africa, where she could meet her family and the people of her chiefdom. They met in December 2004. Culberson was given an emerald African dress as a gift, and was greeted by hundreds of singing and cheering villagers, and given the tribal name Bumpenya, a Mende word for Lady of Bumpe. Culberson is now a television actress, and started a nonprofit organization called the Kposowa Foundation to rebuild Bumpe High School, which had been destroyed by war. She is also working on a documentary, "Bumpenya: Lady of Bumpe," to tell her story and raise money for the region. Though she is at peace with her role as Bumpe's princess, she says she never wants to be chief or live in Sierra Leone.