Mim Paquin (she/her) is an American actor, singer, writer and composer across all media.
The fourth child of five children, Mim Paquin was born as MaryAnne Leslie Paquin on January 24, 1974 in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to Leslie Jane (Nekuda) and Pierre Arnold Paquin. Her mother worked as a substitute special education teacher and stay at home mom who raised five children. Her father was a foreign languages high school teacher, live orchestral audio-engineer, and radio announcer and broadcaster. Both parents were semi-professional actors, singers, stage directors and artistic directors. She grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts and spent summer vacations in Clinton, Massachusetts with her maternal grandmother, Eileen Ann (O’Malley) Nekuda and her grand uncle William Joseph O’Malley.
Mim uses her nickname as her stage name, because her birth name: “MaryAnne,” has too many variant spellings. Mim’s ancestry includes Irish, Welsh, English, Scottish, Czech, German, French Canadian, Acadian, even further back includes Spanish, Mi’kmaq, Pawnee descent, Mayflower passengers, first French and Acadian settlers, indigenous people of North America, and European kings and queens going as far back as Charlemagne. Mim is a fifth-generation performer both of her parents’ sides of the family.
Early Life
At the early age of four, Mim began acting, singing and dancing in musical theatre productions. Her first stage role was as the youngest of the royal children in The King and I, co-directed by her parents at Fairhaven High School in Massachusetts.
Audio recording and engineering was the family business. Her father listened to classical orchestral music every single day. Mim, along with her siblings, began apprenticing with her father on both symphonic recording and theater amplification jobs. She started learning this skill when she was eight years old. At the age of thirteen, Mim became a professional church soloist. From age eight to eighteen, she performed in the ensemble and had lead roles in eight New Bedford High School’s New England Theatre Conference and Moss Hart Award-winning stage musical productions. Roles include: (“Brigitta” in The Sound of Music; “Annie” in Annie; The Music Man; My Fair Lady; Camelot; “City Her” in The Gifts of the Magi; “Nancy” in Oliver!; “Mrs. Cratchit” in Scrooge; “Maria, Duchess of Dene” in Me and My Girl.) Mim was highly active in New Bedford High School’s award winning music department, performing in six select concert choirs and show choirs, as well as occasionally stepping in as a rehearsal conductor. Her senior year of high school she won the soprano solo at the Massachusetts All-States Music Conference. She performed in, choreographed and directed local plays and musical productions, and sang in local professional orchestra choruses. At age seventeen, with the encouragement of her father, she wrote, narrated, engineered and produced a series of hour-long children’s classical music radio programs for WFCC 107.5 FM on Cape Cod, for which she won an honorable mention Massachusetts Broadcasters Award. She and her father won the first place Massachusetts Broadcasters Award for her voice over work on WFCC’s station identification commercial produced by her father.
After graduating from New Bedford High School with music and drama scholarships, she waited a year, working and saving money in order to audition for and attend a conservatory. She performed with local theater productions: UMass Dartmouth Symphony (Porgy & Bess) and Marion Art Centre (“Desiree Armfeldt” in A Little Night Music) and in a stylistically diverse variety of well-known musical groups: Ecclesia Consort of New England, United House of Prayer Gospel Choir, and the New Orleans Jazz Connection. After a successful audition with The Boston Conservatory of Music, Theater and Dance, she went on to the acclaimed musical theatre program with a full-scholarship. She attended for one year, all the while further developing her interest in writing, composing and producing her own original music with the encouragement of academic peers from neighboring Berklee College of Music. After a year, she left the conservatory and worked full-time for a year while maintaining her acting studies at Boston Baked Theatre in Cambridge with author of AUDITION, Michael Shurtleff, and with Andrea Southwick at The Southwick Studio. She successfully auditioned for Berklee College of Music as a voice major and composition major, and received a half-scholarship with eight semesters to decide to attend. She did not attend.
From 1995 to 1999, Mim produced her first songwriting demo at Berklee College of Music with music production and engineer major, David Colozzi, and began gigging on the Boston coffee house music scene, all the while developing her business acumen working in Boston’s high tech and investment banking industries first as a temp at: P.S.D.I., Harvard Business School, and eventually as a full-time web master and developer with SoftBank Investments directly reporting to Ted Dolata. She composed and produced music at Newbury Sound Boston engineered by John Bono, and wrote video-scripts produced by Doug Wicks at The Rendon Group for an hour-long public service announcement aired on FOX-TV New England.
In 1999, without a safety net, Mim left an amazing promotion at SoftBank and moved to New York to continue to pursue acting. Instead she found herself working full-time in the corporate beauty and fashion industry as a consumer marketing project manager and marketing communications manager at Coty Beauty, LLC and Nautica VF. Her focus was communications, market research, front & back-end web design and development, as well as presentation data, visual, video and audio design. In 2000, Mim performed in her first off-off-Broadway production of The Odd Couple (Female Version) to rave reviews. Backstage said, “noteworthy comedic turns come from MaryAnne as Mickey the Cop with a heart of gold.”
In 2002, she started her own five-piece rock and R&B band, Neeto, which performed her own original music. She was featured on Harlan Friedman’s WLIR FM Live program of Long Island’s best bands, and at venues on Long Island and New York City. Mim was described by AuralFix Magazine as “a formidable singer who impressed me with not only the power, but also the control of her voice. Many singers of this style tend to warble all over the place, but Paquin has the happy skill of hitting her notes dead on, leading to a cleaner and ultimately more satisfying sound” and as GoodTimes describes “Hers is a sound of powerful technique and the joys and heartaches of human experience.”
In 2004, Mim performed in stage comedies written by John C. Blenn at both the Governor’s and Brokerage Comedy Clubs. Mim composed her first film-score for a sci-fi film short The Observer. She became the music director for a youth rock mass at St. Anthony’s Church in Oceanside, NY and in 2005 she studied at the Music Liturgy Institute in Indiana summer conference. After a few life changes, Mim began writing and self-producing her solo album, Uprooted (2005).
In 2006, she fully returned to musical theater and vocal performance, performing as “Nellie Forbush” in South Pacific at Lehman Stages with Bronx Opera Orchestra. That year, Mim began working as a soprano soloist and section leader at an episcopal church in Forest Hills, NY and remained there for seven and a half years while she further developed her classical voice. From 2007 to 2009, Mim studied musical theater repertoire and classical voice with vocal titan and Hollywood legend, Marni Nixon. She became a protégé of Ms. Christina Henson-Hayes (protégé of Lily Pons and maestro Laszlo Halasz, founder of NYCO) while studying operatic voice and vocal pedagogy with her for five years.
Some career highlights
Mim performed as a concert soloist with the Spirit of Song Ensemble; The Canadian Chamber Orchestra of New York; Forest Hills Choir; Opera for Humanity (artistic director, Amy Shoremount-Obra); West Village Chorale; Park & Bark Opera; New Bedford Symphony Orchestra, as well as appearances with the SONOS Chamber Orchestra of NY (music & artistic director, Erik Ochsner). In 2008, Mim stage directed, vocal supervised and choreographed local theater productions (Arsenic & Old Lace; Bye Bye Birdie; Annie) in Forest Hills, NY. In 2013, Mim resigned from full-time church singing in order to focus on film acting, concert singing, writing and film production. In 2014, Mim became a business owner and CEO when she established Frogcatcher Films, LLC an ideation think-tank exclusively for developing original creative projects for stage, studio, and film. Today, Mim’s original music is featured in various television, film and stage productions. Her singing voice can be heard in the opening credits for Things Eternal and an original song written for The Clown Prince. Her original film scores include Unremarkable, Two Kisses, and The Observer. Using her diverse background, Mim became the executive consultant for
the award winning The Kids Menu written by Richard Vetere, starring Vincent Pastore and Nyle Lynn, and directed by Paul Borghese.
Ongoing projects in development include:
They Rally for Death – a three act dramedy (stage play in development); The Wonder As They Wander (album and podcast theater in post production); Frogcatcher (film); The Ancient Order (film); Lit. The Musical (stage production); The System (series.)
Where is she now?
Mim, her husband Jason Robinette, their son Zephyr, their rescue cat, Kiko and rescue dog Rohan, and stray cat Sandy live on their 3.5 acre animal haven in Belle Mead, New Jersey lovingly nicknamed, “Clovershire.”