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Sumner in her nominated role,"Meg Brockie" in Brigadoon. Photograph taken by Ivan Boden (2013).
Sumner Perera is twenty one years old and a senior at Harvard College. She has been singing since the age of four and at the age of nine she joined the Youth Conservatory at The Garage Theatre Group, a member of the New Jersey Theatre Alliance. Sumner performed with the Youth Conservatory Group for five years, appearing in a total of ten theatre productions before high school. In 2010 Sumner won the Teaneck Teen Idol competition and in 2011 she won the National High School Teen Idol Competition. Sumner pursued her passion for theatre at her high school, Bergen County Academies, as a student of the Theatre Academy; at the school, she performed in both straight plays and musicals including Macbeth, You Can't Take It With You and Brigadoon. In 2013 she was nominated by Papermill Playhouse’s Rising Star Awards for Best Supporting Actress in the musical Brigadoon in which she acted as "Meg Brockie". The following year, Sumner appeared on the cover of the April 2014 issue of 201 Family Magazine.
In addition to theater, Sumner has acted in several film projects including in an episode of a student web series written by Karen Chee, an episode of the Nickelodeon show "Nick News with Linda Ellerbee", an educational English language program for students in Brazil, and an educational iPad application in which she narrated the first chapter of Frederick Douglass' autobiography. Sumner is also an R&B and jazz vocalist, and has performed on campus for several coffeehouse events at the Queen’s Head Pub, Pforzheimer House events such as the 2017 Holiday Dinner and in the past for numerous fundraisers and at a fashion show at the Sri Lankan Permanent Mission to the UN in NYC. Most recently, Sumner performed a solo jazz vocal concert in Pforzheimer House at Harvard called "500 Days of Sumner".
Sumner performing in the SLP concert at the New York Musical Festival (2017)
Sumner as "Queen Hecuba" in "The Trojan Women" at the Loeb Experimental Theater (2017)
After receiving nine college acceptances (Harvard, Columbia Univ., Princeton, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt, Washington Univ. in St. Louis, Emory and New York Univ.), Sumner currently attends Harvard College as senior in the Class of 2019. At Harvard, she is majoring in Chemical & Physical Biology and minoring in Theater, Dance & Media. She continues her passion for theater at the college, having performed in a total of five theater productions with the Harvard Radcliffe Dramatic Club ("All's Fair", "The Trojan Women", "The Room", "Rocky Horror Picture Show" and "Gypsy") and enrolled in both studio and critical courses of the new Theater, Dance & Media concentration. Sumner acted as a principal role in "All's Fair", the Harvard Class of 2019 Annual Freshman Musical, and acted as the lead in the Greek tragedy, "The Trojan Women" by Euripides and adapted by Jean Paul Sartre. "The Trojan Women" was performed in the experimental theater of the Loeb Drama Center and Sumner's performance as Queen Hecuba was highly commended by the Harvard Crimson Magazine (Click here to read the review). Sumner received praise once again from the Harvard Crimson magazine the semester after, for her performance as the lead, Mama Rose, in the Harvard College Musical Theater production of "Gypsy" on the main stage of the Loeb Drama Center (Click here to read the review).
Last summer, Sumner appeared as "Pearl" in an original musical called The Human Incubator in the 2017 SheNYC Arts Summer Festival at the Connelly Theater. She also performed "Taking It With Me" by student composer, Wildlin Pierrevil in United We Stand, the Student Leadership Program concert of the New York Musical Festival at the Green Room 42. She was also featured in The Interval's article "Women of NYMF 2017" as a performer in the Student Leadership Program concert. This summer, Sumner was a student in the eight week Shakespeare Summer School program at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts (LAMDA). At LAMDA she acted Shakespeare and Jacobean texts, performed jazz renditions of Shakespearean songs, rehearsed stage combat routines, performed classical dances from Shakespeare's era and much more. During the summer, she also continued her research at Dr. Sara Buhrlage's Lab at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, MA. Sumner will pursue her undergraduate thesis at the lab this year, investigating the ability of deubiquitinating enzyme inhibition upon cancer cell death and senescence.
Sumner performing at her own jazz show "500 Days of (Sumner)" in Pforzheimer House (2017)
Photograph taken by Ben Grimm
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