Bio

By age 3, Tessa was active in Girl Scouts, gymnastics and dance; and frequently found herself winning large scale coloring contests. Her adolescent years were spent attending public schools and staying active in hobbies like choir, ice skating, soccer and yearbook. Tessa's acceptance into a competitive dance program deepened her adoration for the art form which laid a foundation that would soon lead her to her first professional role on set. During high school, to survive the turbulent waves of a split home and an ever-changing zip code, when Tessa wasn't dancing, singing or playing soccer… she was watching movies. A film's ability to magically transport her to a new world and shift focus away from her own life to that of the characters in the film, lit a spark deepen within her that would one day grow into a blazing fire.

After high school, Tessa's parents were dead-set on her getting a college education which lead to a BA in film at The University of Texas. During college, while out dancing with friends at a local nightclub, Tessa was scouted and asked to perform as a principal model/dancer in French NBA Player Tony Parker's debut music video "Balance-Toi". Tessa fell in love with the thrill of being on set and went on to grace magazine covers and billboards as a model while shifting her film school focus from directing to acting. Her acting training rapidly evolved into her attendance at 7 different acting studios in order to one day create her own "secret sauce." After her film degree and slot on the dean's A-honor roll was achieved, Tessa journeyed to Los Angeles where she played leading roles in indie films like "The First Born,” “Diamond” and "The Madness Within" while also lending her talents to commercials for brands like Apple, Nike, Dish Network and Dodge. As fate would have it, the traditional path for a new actress in Hollywood soon felt off to Tessa; inspiring her to free up her time and take a deep dive into the world of screenwriting. Tessa’s deeply rooted passion for cinema didn’t take long to open doors for her as a screenwriter when she was chosen to adapt Kate Adamson’s miraculous true story from the book "Paralyzed But Not Powerless" for the big screen.

While continuing to evolve as a performer, and now a performer/writer, Tessa honed her improv comedy skills studying at UCB and showcased her comedic versatility on the show "Barbee Rehab." To make ends meet and further her education in the world of entertainment, Tessa worked nights as a bottle server in prestigious Los Angeles nightclubs. Despite rubbing shoulders with some of the biggest name actors in Hollywood, Tessa was adamant about building a career completely on her own.

It didn’t take long for that calling to spark her evolution into a full-fledged filmmaker. With the advent of Apple’s first smartphone featuring a 4K camera, Tessa quit working nightclubs to protect her purity of spirit and began crafting short films on her iPhone using limited budgets so she could experience firsthand what life is like for a majority of audiences. After learning how to surf these foreign rocky waters, Tessa began searching for the ultimate challenge where she competed in timed filmmaking competitions to polish skills as a filmmaker and discover how to create under extreme pressure. Tessa loved the higher level of pressure and quickly won awards and accolades for each short film she created.

Remembering what her professors said in film school about the lack of truly original films in today’s world, Tessa found herself becoming driven to earn a spot in history books. In order to simultaneously serve her passion for helping others, Tessa set out to create a movie that would inspires audiences to not only overcome their fears but incite them to push beyond any self-perceived limits. Tessa's treacherous expedition began by crafting a movie essentially backwards, using the self-made short films she created from 2017-2018 as the movie's foundation while filming new scenes and writing a fresh plot to weave them all together. With Tessa's starry eyes aimed at the moon, she committed to embodying the film's main character, Daisy Blaine, both in front of the camera and behind it to take the craft of filmmaking to new heights for humankind and bring audiences something they've never seen before.

In order to become Hollywood's first real life movie magician, from 2017 to 2022, Tessa spent the majority of her time offline, in solitude, where she worked passionately inside a private studio slowly learning all the different aspects of making a feature film; essentially crafting a movie by hand, prior to the mainstream existence of AI. It was here, in these moments, while Tessa learned and executed all aspects of both film production and post-production... frame by frame, pixel by pixel... that she patiently, and often painfully, achieved one of the largest motion picture performances by an artist in history. Tessa even built the post-production audio mixing suite by hand with metal poles, rubber sheeting, sound proof fabric and acoustic foam panels.

Tessa’s vision to empower audiences to believe in themselves helped her survive this seemingly impossible process and stay the course as the making of Cinema Rebel slowly evolved into a creative obsession that took over her entire life for nearly 6 years. A human brain and body operating in overdrive for not just months... but years... brought many expressed worries by Tessa's friends and family. Despite their concerns, she stayed committed to the mission where she faced never-ending unknowns, chronic failures, relentless obstacles and a substantial period of time in silent solitude. People even began nicknaming this chapter of her life as a sentence to "movie jail".

Several years later, after overcoming many painful moments were she was tempted to give up, Tessa finally finished the movie and made her attempt to wear over 70 filmmaking hats a success! In this moment of triumph Tessa discovered the inextinguishable power of the human spirit and champions the idea that it may "be even stronger than technology because it doesn't glitch or break down... unless we give it permission.”

After a short festival circuit around the world, Cinema Rebel went on to receive 18 award wins and nominations and is still in queue for up to 6 Guinness World Records. Tessa hopes the daring true tale behind the making of Cinema Rebel will inspire people to not only believe in themselves but reinstate the importance of coming together as a community that values authentic handmade art over artificially manufactured art.

Tessa is presently re-branding Cinema Rebel into Cinema Legend, a big budget studio film that aims to host one of the greatest A-list ensemble casts of all time; and is in prep to launch Vital Spark's debut slate of 10 major motion pictures that will ignite spiritual excellence around the world through the power of storytelling.

TESSA FARRELL

who is Tessa farrell?

TURNING MOVIE MAGIC INTO REALITY

“My dream is to encourage companies and creators worldwide to mindfully sculpt their content and forever push the envelope in the creative realm by curating dynamic potent material that feeds spiritual excellence.”