Sarah Hamilton is an American actress who has done voice work for many national commercial campaigns including Chapstick, CoverGirl-brand cosmetics, V-8 Splash, and Sony-brand electronics. Within the videogame industry, Hamilton is best known for her voice work as April Ryan in the best-selling and critically acclaimed adventure game The Longest Journey, and its sequel, Dreamfall. She also serves on the Board of Statement Arts, a non-profit organization which brings creative arts workshops and productions to underserved and low-income communities.
After graduating from the prestigious New York University Tisch School of the Arts where she worked with members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Hamilton went on to star in stage productions like Troillus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, and Chapter 8 in New York and London. It was through her contact with a New York casting agency that she was later cast as the English voice of April Ryan, the lead protagonist in designer Ragnar Tornquist's PC adventure game The Longest Journey. The game included hours of recorded voice used to comment on the environment, provide information on how to solve puzzles, present dialogue between characters, and advance the plot, and the character of April Ryan was central to all but a tiny percentage of this content. As a result, Hamilton spent approximately eighty hours over ten consecutive days recording voice work for the game, including live dialogue sessions with the other actors so that they could develop a real rapport between their characters. [1]
In 2002 and 2004, Hamilton was respectively diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and cancer, both of which remain symptom free and in remission following a variety of treatments. She credits these diagnoses with inspiring her heavy philanthropic involvement with Statement Arts and seeks to instill the belief in otherwise disadvantaged inner city kids that no matter how bad a situation might seem, anything is possible. During her work with the organization, Hamilton has served as one of the Project Leaders for Statement Arts' ongoing "Project: Urban Arts" program which focuses on fulfilling the needs of the music program for New York City's High School of Environmental Studies, the "World Art Project" which brought some welcome Christmas spirit to areas ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, and "Project: Camp Bayou 2006" which organized a summer arts camp for young people in those same areas.
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