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Joell Jacob: Doing it All

Want a make-up artist? A hair stylist? An actor? A singer? An author? A ukulele player? A voice artist to read books for CD? A stained glass craftsman?

You could ask a different person for each job or you could just ask Joell Jacob. She does them all. That explains why Joell describes herself as a diversified artist.

Many of her make-up clients are business executives who are making television appearances or taking part in promotional or instructional videos.

“High level corporate people, many of them are not used to make-up. Men sometimes don’t want it, they can be uncomfortable, but I can get it done in about five minutes and minimize the uncomfortableness,” she says.

Joell wants the clients to look natural.

“I am not interested in making people look glamorous. I want them to look real,” she says.

In fact, she adds that the most common mistake people make when doing their own make-up is putting on too much.

Joell’s training as a make-up artist was largely on the job. When she was studying hairdressing, just one day in the entire program was devoted to learning cosmetology, but a neighbor in Rhode Island where she grew up was a cosmetologist. He needed a hairdresser for a film shoot and asked her to work with him. In the process, she also learned the skills of professional make-up.

For Joell, one thing led to another. From making up others for commercials, directors began casting her in them.

“I have an ambiguous look,” she says, adding that her father is Filipino.

She feels her appearance is an asset when filming in front of a green screen backdrop, the way many commercials are made, with additional video added later.

“Dark hair looks good in front of a green screen,” she says.

In addition to acting in commercials, Joell’s performance experience has included community theater, but she jokes that her stage career actually started when she played Miss Mina in a production of Dracula at Nathanael Greene Middle School in Providence. Among the long list of commercials on her résumé are spots for F.W. Webb, Remax, and Liberty Mutual. And then there was Afordabail, a Connecticut bail company.

“The idea was that I said you could trust this bail bondsman,” she recalls.

Commercials led to work as a voice-over artist, which in turn led to work as a book reader on audio CDs. Joell has now created a studio in her home in Ivoryton for her audio book work.

“I love voice over,” she says.

It takes her about 30 hours to record a book that will run for 10 hours. After she finishes, an audio proofer listens to the books and lets her know about any corrections she needs to re-record.

“I can’t believe some of the mistakes,” she admits.

When doing an audio book, the sole reader does all the characters. Joell says she is good at Southern accents and British accents, but sometimes messes up the accents that are much closer to home, New York and Rhode Island.

When Joell was in her late 20s, she began to take singing lessons, not because she couldn’t sing, but because she was hesitant to.

I always feared singing,” she says.

She still gets nervous, but now has sung with a number of groups both in Connecticut and Rhode Island, among them Chester-based Exit 6. At the moment, she is performing with a trio called Take 3 that appears every other Thursday on Quattro’s in Guilford.

Joell also writes her own music and plays both ukulele and tenor guitar. She has recorded one of her songs, “Let Me Go.”

“It’s a sad song,” she explains.

When her other activities had slowed in the economic downturn of 2009, Joell did home care and the song is based on her time looking after an Alzheimer’s patient.

Music is not all she has written. Joell has also authored a book, Happy: How to Manage Depression and Anxiety without Big Pharma. For a life with so much activity, Joell says she has always struggled with melancholy and negative emotions.

“I wanted to tell my own experience of the stuff I have gone through and the solutions I have found,” she says. “Maybe my story can help other people. Now I am in a wonderful place, happy and content.”

She says that changing her diet and consulting a naturopathic physician contributed to her present wellbeing.

Joell’s is also a trained Reiki practitioner though she says she only treats her husband Gerry Polinsky and the couple’s two Alaskan malamutes. Polinsky is a lighting director for movies and video productions, as well as an open-water sea kayak instructor.

At this point in her life, Joell says she finds herself growing more interested in crafts.

“As I get older, I think I get more introverted and I go back to crafts,” she says.

She sews, paints, and also creates stained glass art. Her first stained glass piece came from a pattern she bought at Vijon Studios in Old Saybrook. For her second piece, she designed a large bass that now hangs in her living room. She now has a studio for stained glass in her home, though for really messy work she uses the garage.

Joell says she sometimes thinks about what her life would have been like if she had focused all her energies on one of the many career paths she has followed.

“I wonder what it would have been like sometimes to do one thing, but in the end, I am glad I didn’t,” she says—and that is how you get to be a diversified artist.