Tea Leigh
Part of what drew musician Tea Leigh to art school was the chance to apply on the strength of her portfolio instead of her SAT scores—frustrated, she had walked out in the middle of the test. Tea, who has moderate dyslexia, wound up choosing the Kansas City Art Institute over the Savannah College of Art and Design, in part because KCAI offered her a stronger scholarship package.
Initially a photography major, she switched to an interdisciplinary major before taking a year off after a tumultuous sophomore year that included being held up at gunpoint. She didn’t go back, later turning down multiple acceptance letters to schools such as the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design.
“In my heart, I knew that I would never go back to school,” she said. “I think there’s an excitement about applying to schools...you get in, and you kind of want that feeling, and you’re like, ‘I’m gonna do it,’ and you just realize that no, you have to do what you want—not what a scholarship says, or what mom or dad wants, or what your friends encourage you to do—even though everyone thinks you’re making the biggest mistake of your life.”
When she took time off from school, she bartended and worked as a personal assistant to a glassblower. Following a breakup and the death of a friend, she moved home to Texas before packing her bags for Boston, where she first began to take her music, a lifelong passion, seriously.
Highlights
The benefits of starting a music career in Boston: There is something motivating about it being a college town even though you’re not in college. Everyone is doing something...There’s all these people doing all these great things, and I need to get off my ass and do my great thing.
Coping with college pressure: Think about the pressures that society puts on people. Finish college. Go to school...So a part of me, even though I knew I didn’t want to go to school, was so scared that I would end up broke, and I would end up with no career and nothing to show for my life. And still, to this day, even though I consider myself relatively successful in the things that I do, I still think that. I think it’s just a matter of learning not to think that ’cause you’ve been taught it your whole life.
Living with dyslexia: I hate to say that it’s a disability...it’s totally not. I just realized that I had to learn differently. And because I’m dyslexic, I stay away, I think, from certain academics, and that really fueled me [when I was] growing up in music and art and expressing myself in a different way