A Windsor Terrace woman is turning her childhood dreams of theater into a reality.

Miranda Cornell says her mother noticed her love for the arts at an early age.

“We were at a community theater production of Ragtime, which is famously like a three and a half hour show,” Cornell says. “And a community theater is usually hit or miss, and she said I was completely engaged the entire time.”

The now theater director says her family came over from Japan in the 1920s ahead of War War II.

She says the memories of that time in history are too painful for many of her family to recall. “I think it’s something that got lost both with that immigration move, and then going through the internment camps,” Cornell says.

Cornell learned that there was a performance of Our Town at one of the internment camps.

She says high school students were performing behind barbed wire, and her family even has a personal connection.

“Topaz is the camp that my grandmother and her 11 siblings and her mom were in for three years between 1942 and 1945,” Cornell says. “And just to think that they could have seen this production.”

Cornell also fights for social justice and racial issues.