69°
Teachers frequently told Joan Franzino she talked too much. They were right. Franzino, a Greenwich resident who grew up in Westport, talks all day now. She's a voice artist who paints images with inflections that turn on a dime. "I was meant," she says, "to talk for a living."
Franzino's career path, however, was not a straight line. She graduated from Fairfield University with a degree in mathematics. "I was math professor bound," she says. After graduating, faced with the prospect of spending more money and taking more courses, Franzino hit "career rock bottom." So she kept her retail job in South Norwalk.
A relative inspired her to find a real career. "My cousin went from working in a big company to being an electrologist," Franzino says. "She basically told me to pick something I liked and go for it. She said, 'The whole world is open.' That was a paradigm shift for me."
Franzino enrolled at the Connecticut School of Broadcasting and found herself behind a radio microphone. She did shopping shows for a Bridgeport station, then worked as a morning show sidekick in Westchester County, N.Y., while doing voiceovers on the side. "I was doing everything I could possibly do, and I still wasn't making any money," she says. "I hit a major wall."
She did radio for 10 years before dedicating herself to voiceover work. Now you hear her everywhere. "I pretty much get hired to be the perky girl," Franzino says. "Sometimes I'm the voice in your head, the mom, the teen, I'm the girl who makes complicated stuff sound easy." She has clients nationwide, including about 40 in the tristate area. On the radio, you'll hear Joan's voice on Twizzlers, St. Vincent's Hospital and car commercials.
Joan juggles her assignments while raising a 4-year-old boy, Kingsley, who enjoys talking, too. Fortunately, the boy knows at least one adult who won't ever tell him to stifle it.
Click here to follow Daily Voice Westport and receive free news updates.
