In the spring of 1993 Jaime Newman of Cranbrook Kingswood placed fifth in Class B/C/D Dramatic Interpretation at the MIFA State Finals. The next year she won it. The year after that she was second. The year after that she won it again.
Four state finals, four years running, and two championships in between, a run good enough that by the time she left Cranbrook in 1996 she had already produced three plays of her own, having rented a theater at sixteen, hired a director and a cast, and called the operation Apollo Theatre Productions.
Two schools, one stage
Newman started at Boston University's theater conservatory and finished at Northwestern, with a detour that had nothing to do with a classroom: at ten years old, on a trip to Los Angeles with her father, she sat in the audience for a taping of the Saved by the Bell pilot. At eleven she had her first stage credit, in a Jewish Ensemble Theatre production of Israel Horovitz's A Rosen by Any Other Name. By the time she got to Cranbrook, and later to the summer stages of Interlochen, where she won the Corson Award for Outstanding Achievement in Acting, the direction was set.
The work started arriving fast. She played Kristina Cassadine on General Hospital, then Lt. Laura Cadman on Stargate Atlantis, then a recurring run on Veronica Mars as Mindy O'Dell. There were parts on Eureka, Grimm, Bates Motel, the lead on ABC's Eastwick, a small but pointed scene opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can. Two decades of television and film work, mostly the kind that doesn't make headlines, which is most of what a working actor's career actually looks like.
The short that became a proof of concept
In 2018, Newman produced Skin, a short film written and directed by her husband, the Israeli-American filmmaker Guy Nattiv. It had been rejected as a feature. "We were so devastated that we literally took our retirement funds and made the short, as if proof of concept," she said afterward. It was made, she has said, against the backdrop of Charlottesville ("the world kind of caught on fire") and it went on to win the 2019 Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film.
"Besides the birth of my kid, it was the most incredible moment of my life," she said. "It was genuinely unexpected, we had no idea."
The Oscar turned into a producing career in earnest. She executive produced the Oscar-shortlisted short Ala Kachuu (Take and Run), produced and acted in Tatami, and was signed by WME as a producer off the strength of her work with Nattiv on Golda. Most recently she has been a series regular on Netflix's The Hunting Wives, with a JonBenét Ramsey limited series and several more projects in production.
"I never thought I would wind up on Netflix seen by a billion people," she said in 2025.
The through-line
Asked in 2019 about founding her own theater company as a teenager, Newman drew a straight line from it to the Oscar stage: "I see a direct through-line from that 16-year-old to me at age 41 standing up on that Oscar stage." Her two state championships are another early chapter in that busy performing life.
On record
Our results archive is still being built and has gaps, so this is simply what we hold today.
