Aidan Gemme: A Life on and off Stage

While it is rare for anyone at 23 to have lived many lives, Aidan Gemme ’26 has. Luckily, his gift for storytelling allows those around him to vicariously experience these many adventures, often with many laughs. Despite — or perhaps because of — Aidan’s early years spent in the theater spotlight, his genuineness as a friend, legal scholar, teammate, and leader speak to the most important character he’s ever embodied: himself. 

From Yogurt to Broadway

Growing up in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., Aidan spent the first 18 years of his life amid a world of stardom. At four years old, Aidan declared he wanted to be famous. Supportively, Aidan’s mom brought him to an open call in the big city. This could have been the moment everything changed. Four-year-old Aidan as a Broadway star. But no.

“I turned away so mortified, petrified of the whole thing,” Aidan said.

Five years later, at the wise age of nine, with (almost) double the life experience since his first audition attempt, Aidan tried again. With the comfort of a friend who was active in the Westchester Community Theater scene, Aidan courageously took on the world of the showcase: a performance opportunity for talented youth to be scouted by professional representation.

His first big role was to advertise yogurt. But Aidan did such a good job selling yogurt that a professional manager took him under his wing for less dairy-filled opportunities.

“I was very, very lucky. I got very fortunate,” Aidan said.

From the ages of nine to 13, Aidan was in New York six days a week (and on the seventh he rested). At the cost of what, though? For Aidan, it was sixth grade science. The first show he booked in the city required consistently skipping the class in order to arrive in time for rehearsal. Somehow, despite a plethora of academic accomplishments, he still hasn’t caught up on that part.

“If you look at my Amherst transcript, you’ll notice that I have not taken many science classes because the first show that I got was when real science [was happening],” he said.

It’s a miracle most of the shows he was in scheduled rehearsals in the summer, otherwise Amherst may never have seen him.

Performing in shows in St. Louis, Mo.; Cambridge, Mass.; and the little-known stages of Broadway, Aidan took on roles including Snoopy in “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” and Michael Banks in the Broadway production of “Mary Poppins,” and Boy in “Waiting for Godot” alongside Sir Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian Mckellen. With a repertoire as impressive as this, it makes sense why the Boston Globe published a feature on 11-year-old Aidan, calling him a “stage pro.”

Reflecting back on these middle school years, Aidan said it felt like a different life.

“There’s something about being in a professional space as a kid, where there’s a lot expected of you, but you’re not putting as much pressure on yourself,” Aidan said. “When you’re 11 years old, you’re just doing it for fun.”

At the end of middle school, Aidan made another pivotal decision. “I wanted to do high school, just normally,” he said.

Still within a contract for his role as Peter Llewelyn Davies in “Finding Neverland,” he left the show. This decision required a lot of explaining to others in the theater-world who couldn’t fathom his choice. He explained that while most of the child actors he knew went to performing arts high schools, he went to a public high school and played sports instead.

“People would be like, ‘you’re applying to colleges? Why are you going to college?’” Aidan told me. For many, the ultimate goal of college would be to find employment, so many couldn’t grasp why Aidan wanted to “step back” from a promising theater career. His response was simple: “No, I want to read books.”

He also didn’t view going to college as a step back. “On paper, [performing] stands out as a big thing that I’ve done, but I’ve always wanted to do other things,” Aidan said. He explained that theater at this level of a time commitment was precluding other ways he wanted to be spending his time — for example, just enjoying being a tween.

Normal High School

It was after he had made his decision to have a “normal” high school experience that he began chasing other opportunities.

During junior year of high school, Aidan started running seriously. And just as broader horizons were beginning to present themselves — Covid hit.

“I ran one senior [and] one junior cross country season and did well enough to … get enough interest [from schools],” Aidan said. “I remember it was the indoor state track meet where we got the call that school was shutting down.” The time he ran in that meet was what stuck with him throughout the college recruitment process. Virtual for the rest of junior year and a participant in his high school’s “half-the-grade-in-school half-the-week” creative Covid schema, Aidan felt adrift: All of the opportunities he stopped acting for had seemingly shut down.

While still possible, solo running became lonely. “I was mainly just going on runs by myself,” he said. This isolation helped him realize what he was looking for in a college: “A place in a community of like-minded and capable people.”

Gap Year

With the pandemic in full swing, Aidan decided to take a gap year: He decided to take one more opportunity on the screen. Recently cast as Jacob in Ava DuVernay’s “Naomi,” a 2022 superhero TV show, Aidan moved down the coast all by himself to Atlanta, Georgia to film at the peak of the pandemic.

When his initial plan to enroll at Amherst in January 2022 after wrapping the filming process fell through, he decided to spend the second half of the year travelling abroad. Living in Ecuador for a few months, and then participating in Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms in Spain, Aidan got to see much of the world. While the experience was incredibly eye-opening, he said it was also “incredibly difficult.”

Running Back on Stage

Once he arrived at Amherst in August 2022, Aidan felt more mature and really craved community. He carried the duality of being both “more independent and really not wanting to be independent.” For much of his first three years at Amherst, the cross country team was a big part of his Amherst experience as he was finally able to run in community with other people. It was through running his first year that he met his girlfriend, Bella Lozier ’26.

“We met through the team and immediately bonded. I feel like in the beginning of freshman year, something that was really meaningful was when you felt like … you could have deep and important conversations. And so right away, it felt like we could talk about anything,” Bella said. 

Bella also said that Aidan, as a captain of the team, “felt a lot of responsibility to be looking out for his teammates and caring for them.”

Despite the brief high school hiatus from acting, performance became an integral part of Aidan’s Amherst life after — to his own surprise — finding Mr. Gad’s House of Improv quite funny. Now, he’s its current director. 

It was during the first week of freshman year that his friend Theo Dassin ’24 asked if he wanted to audition for Mr. Gad’s together. He found the group to be an ideal outlet for his love of performance and creativity. Mr. Gad’s is lucky to be the one activity he decided he had time for, supplementing his time commitment to the cross country team.

Fellow Mr. Gad’s performer Josh Cohen ’26 said he has really enjoyed getting to know Aidan better this year — the two of them have even started their own new sketch comedy group on campus called Mere Entertainment as well as their own radio show. You might have even seen the two playing catch or hitting each other flyballs on the First-Year quad or down on the baseball fields.

Bella said she will always associate Mr. Gad’s Monday night performances as epitomizing Aidan in some way — “making a fool of himself” every Monday night. “It’s wildly impressive that every week after a long day of classes, late at night, [the performers] will go on stage and do whatever, no matter how crazy they look, so that they can have fun — so that we all can have fun,” she said.

Despite this wildly successful theater background and his regular performing at Amherst, Aidan says he always appreciates when his friends at Amherst “forget” his theater-kid past.

Life in LJST

As evidenced by his forthcoming diploma, Aidan has matured at least a little bit from his sixth grade science days: Outside of acting and performing, he does, in fact, attend classes.

During his first year at Amherst, he took two classes that shaped his commitment to law, jurisprudence, and social thought (LJST). They’re two of Amherst’s most famous classes: William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science Austin Sarat’s “Murder” and George Daniel Olds Professor of Economic and Social Institutions Kristin Bumiller’s “Justice,” the latter of which took place in the Northampton County Sheriff’s Office where half the students were incarcerated.

These classes made academics come alive for Aidan; they felt like “opportunities as opposed to obligations.” This initial impression proved true and planted the academic seeds of interest in death penalty research.

The following year, Aidan was accepted into Sarat’s 2024 colloquium, “America’s Death Penalty,” where he extended his work with a small group of students into the summer. Out of this project, Aidan, along with Sarat and Julia Morgan-Canales ’26, co-authored an article, which was published in the Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights and Social Justice’s fall 2025 issue: “When Executions Don’t Kill: The Stories of Eight People Who Survived Their Date With Death.” As the title suggests, the research focused on case studies of failed executions in the U.S.

Implementing a people-centered approach to these cases, their project tells the story of who these people are, the context of each scenario, and provides a legal deep-dive into a particularly challenging set of jurisprudence due to the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition of double jeopardy — a second punishment of the same crime — and the Eighth Amendment’s protections against “cruel and unusual” punishment.

Thanking his “luck” once again, Aidan told me that this research will turn into a full-length book co-authored by Sarat. After working on it for the last two and a half years, just this past month, they submitted a full manuscript to a publisher.  

In addition to research on capital punishment, Aidan has also pursued independent scholarship through his honor’s thesis on a (slightly) less gruesome topic: free speech on college campuses.

While initially Aidan planned to write about free speech in ballparks and the types of expressions parents get away with saying in the specificity of that space, he ended up writing about free speech on college campuses with the guidance of Sarat, who became his thesis advisor. His research focused on the legal reality that private institutions like Amherst are not governed by the First Amendment — nothing in the Constitution requires private universities to guarantee free speech — and argued that the wisdom of collegiate classrooms could be incorporated into a broader democratic society, such as weighing evidence and cultivating curiosity.

Responding to the critique that elite institutions like Amherst teach “ideological indoctrination,” Aidan has aimed to create an alternative perspective: “It’s not that colleges are failing, or … that colleges are incapable of being these really important democratic educators.” He instead explained that “we need to re-evaluate and recommit to the core capabilities that the classroom has, and not view colleges as separate from the world at large, but rather as these really important places where we can teach students how to be committed democratic citizens.” 

Amherst Being Amherst

As a humanities major, especially as a senior humanities major, Aidan has found himself with copious amounts of unstructured time. Although Aidan spent much of his senior year focusing on his thesis, he also had lots of time to explore new things and spend time with his friends. The temporality of senior spring has also brought out the desire to experience new things Amherst has to offer. From watching four hours of softball for the first time, to hosting a radio show, he has brought this philosophy into practice.

As aforementioned, Josh and Aidan started a radio show this past semester. A way to appreciate stereotypical college things, a campus radio show was an obvious bucket list item. In a full-circle way, Josh remembered overhearing Aidan talking about the New York Mets at the table over in Valentine Dining Hall during their freshman year and developing a “friend crush” on him.

The show, “Top of the Ninth,” a symbolically resonant title, was translated by Aidan to mean “the game’s almost over, but not yet, and there’s still something that we want to do, and something that we want to do is aimlessly talk at each other and make jokes that our parents will listen to and then tell us we should probably stay on theme more.” The show’s eight episode run has even featured President Michael Elliott, who agreed to blindly read jokes live on air.

Reflecting Back

I asked Aidan how his freshman self would react to seeing the graduating version of him. He said that, for one, first-year Aidan could not imagine his life at Amherst without being on the cross country team, and while naive Aidan probably would have thought that writing an LJST thesis and being in Mr. Gad’s sounded cool, he wouldn’t have necessarily expected these to be such defining facets of his college experience.

Besides research with Sarat, other Amherst professors have also shaped his Amherst journey. Aidan thanked Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture Ilan Stavans; James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought Lawrence Douglas; and Professor of Philosophy Nishiten Shah, who have all impacted him not just academically, but personally through sharing conversations about random topics and life.

“I would definitely tell freshman year me to go to office hours, not because it’s going to help your grade, but because, if you’re lucky, you’ll get to actually have a conversation about [Immanuel] Kant’s groundwork,” Aidan said. 

Looking Beyond 

After Amherst, Aidan will be working as a case manager at the law firm Hecker Fink LLP in New York. This experience will be informative on whether or not he attends law school in the future. He also would like to keep up creativity post-Amherst even if it’s not in the form of comedy.

In his final weeks as a student at Amherst college, Aidan is looking forward to “everything.” “I will miss the physical space that is Amherst College,” he said.

In leaving advice for other Amherst students, Aidan encouraged embracing all Amherst has to offer.

“Go to a Gad’s show or a workshop, not because, it’s Gad’s and it’s cool, but because improv is weird and different; do a WAMH show, or go on your friend’s WAMH show; go to a sporting event to see what your peers are capable of; go to a poster presentation to see what your classmates are thinking about, see how capable they are,” he said.