World Bipolar Day 2022
This vlog is part of This Is My Brave’s 2022 Awareness Days campaign. With World Bipolar Day occurring annually on March 30th, TIMB alum Zak Sandler (NYC 2018) is sharing his story to help us continue our mission to put faces and names to stories of recovery. We are grateful for our alumni community that continues to show up and lead the way in ending the stigma surrounding mental health conditions.
About Zak:
Zak Sandler has played piano on Broadway for Wicked, Mean Girls, Motown, and The Color Purple. He has music directed / conducted at the Kennedy Center, the Public Theater, Goodspeed, the Dallas Theater Center, and TONY award-winning Signature Theatre (VA).
Zak is writing music, lyrics, and libretto for Inside My Head, his musical about learning to work with his bipolar. The show premiered at NY Theatre Barn and was a semi-finalist at the O’Neill Theater’s National Music Theater Conference. Zak will be touring the show to colleges and mental health organizations starting in May 2022. He’s also co-writing Anthem, which explores why we sing the national anthem, based on real letters from American wars. Anthem has played at the NY Fringe Festival and will soon be released as a film version available on streaming services. Zak is arranging and co-orchestrating Unlimited, a revue of the work of Stephen Schwartz (composer/lyricist for Wicked, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Prince of Egypt), and co-writing a Jewish musical, Happy Challah Days.
Beyond musical theater, Zak is an avid mental health activist, speaking about his bipolar on This Is Actually Happening (podcast with 45K+ plays) and Moments of Clarity (radio show with 1M+ listeners). He won the 2018 Young Leader Award from the New York State chapter of The National Alliance on Mental Illness for raising awareness about and normalizing mental conditions, and is a featured speaker with This Is My Brave and the JED Foundation.
Yale, B.A. Music, 2008
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