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AMY LYNN & JESSI MAY STEVENSON
BY ILONA SAARI
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SISTERS, SISTERS THERE WERE NEVER SUCH DEVOTED SISTERS
All kinds of weather, we stick together. The same in the rain or sun. Two different faces, but in tight places. We think and we act as one.
PAINTING BY AMY LYNN STEVENSON
Raised by educators amid the corn fields in Holdrege, Nebraska, a town with 5,000 residents if you don’t count the cows, Amy Lynn and Jessi May Stevenson learned early on about the arts. Mom, Patricia Sheffield, was an art teacher and painter with exhibits in galleries and art shows, while Dad, Charles Stevenson, coached basketball, taught school and served as a principal and superintendent of schools.
Though 4-1/2 years apart, the sisters were BFFs from the start. They went everywhere together and, if Amy Lynn’s friends complained about having a “little kid” tag along, they soon learned that the girls were a package deal. Amy Lynn took after her mother with a natural ability to draw, and loved to paint. Jessi knew from the first time she stepped on stage as a child in a school play that acting and all things related to theater would be the foundation of her future. After graduation, Amy Lynn went to the University of Nebraska at Kearney, where she earned her BFA. A few years later, Jessi followed and secured her degree in acting, with a minor in art, then received the Chancellor’s Full Ride Scholarship Award to the University of California, Irvine where she earned her MFA. Jessi also studied at Harvard University with the Moscow Art Theater and the American Repertory Theater in Boston.
Amy Lynn moved to Minneapolis after college where her distinct style, influenced by the 1920s Jazz Age paintings in festive settings … all that “philandering, seducing and dancing while musicians play into the night” as she described it, catapulted her career.
One critic noted that when viewing her paintings you get the feeling of having crashed a party at Jay Gatsby’s mansion.
After settling in Los Angeles, Jessi hit the boards running, starring as “Ophelia” in “Hamlet” in Hollywood, and in
AMY LYNN & JESSI MAY STEVENSON
