 full NAMEgrace elizabeth stephen nicknamesgracie, gee date of birth / agejanuary 17, 1989 / 28 star signcapricorn (self-controlled, caring, trustworthy, eager to learn, competitive) hometownsouth boston, ma current residenceboston (back bay), ma occupationtalent booking and promotion, house of blues boston education boston college high school class of 2007 berklee college of music class of 2011 marital statussingle | biography
In the midst of a Nor'easter in January of 1989 while her father was on duty as a Boston police officer all the way across the city, a little girl from Southie decided she was going to grace the world with her presence. As a nod to all the inconvenience she caused, her parents elected to name her Grace. The only daughter of the eventual chief of the BPD and his classical violinist wife, she found herself prone to causing trouble in the most absurd ways she could. With a man of the law as a father and a free spirited artist as a mother, this left the boundaries of what could be classified as rebellion wide open. If she didn't disappoint one parent, she surely disappointed the other.. but it was hard to disappoint both at once.
Eventually, she found her way. Rock music was the way. Grace was able to excel in school which gained her enough ground with her parents to spend nights and weekends playing drums for an alt-rock band in a boy's garage with just a modicum of trust. Unfortunately, the ego of three men in one band was too much for Grace. After several months of trying to get some creative input in the venture and failing over and over, Grace left the band and began recruiting for her own all-female band venture. While this worked for a year, the girls eventually matriculated and knew their time had to come to an end. However, the silver lining was that Grace was noticed by an associate professor at the Berklee College of Music. She began her focus on film scoring, which was the industry she noted was severely lacking female influence. This pleased her mother, which she personally hated.
Until she didn't. Grace's mom was diagnosed with stage 4 liver cancer in her freshman year at Berklee. She tried to take time off from school to help more at home, but her mother refused to allow it. This was what she had always wanted for Grace--for her to realize that she was destined for something important. At school she'd find out whether or not that was music or something greater, but pulling her daughter back from her first real world experience was something that Sylvia Stephen would not stand for. She passed shortly after Grace began her sophomore year, and left a novel's worth of literature in a letter to her daughter that pleaded with her to continue on.
Through her time at Berklee, Grace spent more and more time focusing on getting more women visible in the arts, a fight she inherited from her mother before her. Before she had finished school, she'd composed scores for 14 short films and had offers pour into her from Los Angeles, begging her to come out west to score a real film, a real television show, anything they could shove into her hands. Although she desperately wanted the opportunity, Grace felt in her bones that Boston was where she needed to be. While she completed several more small compositions over the next few years, she abandoned composing professionally. With connections through her father, now the chief of police, Grace took a job booking and promoting for the House of Blues in Boston. This gave her the opportunity to stack a well known venue with female talent and promote the hell out of it in the testosterone filled neighborhood that surrounds Fenway Park.
Still, there is an itch she cannot scratch. Her mother wanted this for her, felt in her bones that her destiny was to do something big. She thought that she was accomplishing that, that she was doing her part to change the world from her corner in her way. She's constantly on the lookout for something bigger. And until that bigger just happens to stumble upon her, well, she's alright with the weekend trips to the Berkshires to skydive and zipline and do anything else for the adrenaline rush that numbs the ticking in her head.
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