Bella Higginbotham

Bella Higginbotham is a 15-year-old American actress from Nashville, Tennessee. A pretender since she could speak, Bella began acting on stage when she was only five years old, playing Wacky The Puppet in the musical Annie at a local theater. She was so focused and present on stage that audience members often mistook her for an actual puppet, not realizing she was a real child until curtain call. Bella began her professional career at age 6 playing Gretl in The Sound of Music with Nashville's premiere equity theater, Studio Tenn, (alongside Broadway veterans Ben Davis and Jessica Grove) and later played several iconic stage roles with the same company, among them: Cosette in Les Miserables (with Broadway veterans Michael Elrod, Chuck Todd, Rachael Potter, and Jake Speck), Zuzu in It's A Wonderful Life, and Lucy in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Other Studio Tenn credits include Gypsy, A Christmas Carol, and Evita (in a historic performance alongside Broadway veterans Eden Espinosa, Anthony Crivello, René Millán, and Ben Crawford). Bella has also worked with the Nashville Repertory Theater and was a member of the 2018 Apprentice Company at Nashville Shakespeare Festival where she appeared as a fairy in A Midsummer Night's Dream at Shakespeare in the Park. She has also been fortunate to originate several roles with The Theater Bug, her favorite local youth theater. In 2019, Bella traveled to NYC to play Kathy in a 29-Hour Reading of Trevor the Musical, a new musical in development for Broadway. Bella's onscreen debut was as Anne-Claire in her first feature film, Troop Zero (2019), alongside Viola Davis, Mckenna Grace, Jim Gaffigan, and Allison Janney, under the masterful direction of Bert & Bertie. Her first television role is series regular, Lauren Gibby, in The Mighty Ducks: Gamechangers. A talented voice actor and singer, Bella can be heard voicing multiple characters in the animated short film Du Iz Tak? (2018) directed by Golden Gate Award nominee Galen Fott. Bella is not only an accomplished actor and singer, but she is also a dancer with a special love of tap. She plays the ukulele and the bass guitar, and is a visual artist who loves drawing. Other interests include watching anime and reading almost every genre imaginable. She hopes to one day appear on Broadway and also devise ways to save all the manatees from becoming endangered. When she grows up, Bella would like to be an actor and an illustrator.