Wendy Snow Walker may be new to Western Pennsylvania, but she has quickly discovered one important part of the local culture — a lot of veterans are from here and people pay homage to them.

“It seemed that everywhere I went, I saw a monument, a park, some sort of statue for the veterans and I thought, ‘We have to do something for the veterans here,’ ” she said.

By “here,” Ms. Walker was referring to the Henry Mancini Arts Academy, where she is the new director. The academy is a program of the Lincoln Park Center for Performing Arts in Midland.

Although Ms. Walker is new to the position, she has already spearheaded the creation of a project called Heroes, a communitywide performing arts tribute to veterans.

Heroes kicked off in the fall and has enlisted Lincoln Park students as well as other schools, organizations, groups and the community. Its website just went live and features the soundtrack of a song written and performed by a local Vietnam veteran, Kent Cox.

Heroes involves various forms of performing, including having students interview veterans and then write poems that other students turn into jazz and musical pieces, which, in turn, are given to dance classes to perform, Ms. Walker said.

It will develop over time with “pop-up” performances at malls, senior citizen and retirement villages, and veterans homes.

It is exactly what the center was hoping for when they hired Ms. Walker, said Gavan Pamer, Lincoln Park artistic director.

“We wanted someone to take the Academy to the next level,” he said. “We wanted to get the community more involved — and that is one thing that is so wonderful about Wendy. She found out what was important in the tri-state area and ran with it.” 

Ms. Walker, 46, believes Heroes is a natural for this area.

“There are so many brave Americans from this area and we can honor them,” she said. “This is a communitywide project. We want as many people involved as we can find.” 

Ms. Walker was born in Alexandria, Va. Her parents decided they wanted to raise their children in the country, so the family moved to a farm in western Maryland when she was 7 years old. 

“I grew up playing in the woods and with animals,” she said. In fifth grade, she was an understudy for a part in a school play when the student in the role got laryngitis and Ms. Walker was called to take the stage.

“I went on not knowing all of the parts. But I made it through the show and knew I wanted to be on stage,” she said. Ms. Walker fell in love with performing on stage and with theatrical production from the beginning to the end.

She was a rarity in that she was a biology major who attended college on a drama scholarship.

“Maryland has these wonderful arts scholarships and I won one, but I came from a family of doctors and thought I was supposed to be a doctor,” she said.

Early in her college studies, she amended her major so that her passion and career goals were better aligned. Despite the long line of doctors in her family, her parents were very supportive of her career change.

After college, Ms. Walker taught for 16 years at Bishop Walsh School, a Catholic school in Cumberland, Md., where she started teaching a science class and later headed the music program for grades K-12.

When her daughter, Whitney, graduated from high school, Ms. Walker auditioned for a couple of plays in New York City. She was selected to play a witch in a production of “Macbeth” and spent the summer of 2010 performing in New York.

She returned to Bishop Walsh in the fall and appeared in regional theater. It was about that time that she was cast as a secretary in the Netflix series “House of Cards” for 2012 and 2013. She also performed in other roles until she learned about the position at Lincoln Park.

“I looked at the job description and knew it was something I could do, but I wasn’t quite sure I wanted it,” Ms. Walker said. “After five minutes into my job interview, I knew that I had to get this job.” She was hired and moved to Midland in May 2014.

Mr. Pamer was impressed with her credentials.

“She was a working artist, she had an education background, she was a stage manager and she had managed a ballet school,” he said.

As director of Henry Mancini Arts Academy, Ms. Walker oversees the administration, curriculum and faculty for programming offered through the academy, which strives to take arts into the community.

It means not only teaching courses at the center but working with students from other schools and taking programming to other locations, such as local senior centers and elsewhere.

“I like to say we teach everyone from 3 to 103,” Ms. Walker said.

Kathleen Ganster, freelance writer: suburbanliving@post-gazette.com.

First Published: January 15, 2015, 5:00 a.m.