Courtenay Cholovich carries two or three small notebooks in her bag.
When an idea strikes her – a funny line, an observation, the beginnings of a premise – the Chattanooga-area comedian writes it down by hand. Sometimes she’ll sit with the idea and work out where it might fit into a performance. Other times, she’ll take it to an open mic in its raw, unfinished form and see what happens in front of an audience.
“Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t,” Cholovich says. “Then you decide, OK, maybe this isn’t worth pursuing. Or maybe it has legs, so you try it again. It’s an iterative process.”
The description applies to more than her comedy.
Over the years, Cholovich has been an actor, writer, director, theater teacher, producer and stand-up comedian, moving among art forms while continually finding new ways to create.
The common thread, she says, emerged as she began to realize that performing someone else’s work wasn’t enough.
“I love acting. I love sinking my teeth into one character, one role in a show,” she says. “But what fires me up most is the opportunity to create new work, to collaborate with like-minded people and generate ideas together to make something new.”
Even better, she says, is when the work engages with the community around it.
“I love when the work is about more than the performance itself,” she says. “When it becomes part of a conversation that extends beyond what’s happening onstage.”
A loud kid from Dalton
Cholovich’s path into the arts began in Dalton, Georgia, where she became involved in school and community theater at a young age.
Asked what drew a kid from Dalton toward acting, Cholovich offers a simpler explanation.
“I’m loud and I like attention,” she laughs.
But Dalton also gave her places to put that energy. She became involved with community theater, including Dalton Little Theatre, and credits her middle school drama teacher with encouraging her creativity and pushing her to grow.
Cholovich eventually earned a degree in acting from the University of Florida, where she received classical, conservatory-style training. She followed that with a master’s of fine arts in theater and performance at Arizona State University.
The programs represented opposite ends of the theatrical spectrum. While her undergraduate work emphasized traditional acting methodology and the classics, graduate school introduced her to community-driven and devised theater, solo performance and more experimental work.
That experience helped move Cholovich from interpreting roles toward creating work herself. She began writing and performing solo shows, including one presented at the Phoenix Fringe Festival.
She later moved to New York City, where she spent several years pursuing theater, film and television. A series of short films she appeared in made the festival circuit, with one earning her a best supporting actress nomination.
“I remember when I first saw my name on an IMDb page,” she says. “That was insane.”
But eventually, life pulled her back toward home.
Coming home
Cholovich returned to the region during one of the most difficult periods of her life.
Her family was still here, and her father was seriously ill. He died a few months after she returned.
Cholovich was also struggling with addiction.
“I’m a recovering addict. I’ve been sober for almost nine years now,” she says. “That wasn’t the case at the time. It was another reason I needed to come home and get myself straight. I’d lost sight of myself, of art and of creating.”
Recovery became part of a larger process of rediscovering who she was and what she wanted to make.
“It’s been a personal journey through my own health, life and identity,” she says, “and those experiences come through in the art I create and the work I do in the community.”
Returning home also brought Cholovich back to where her artistic life had begun. She took a job teaching theater at her former middle school in Dalton, where she spent five years building and expanding the drama program. The teacher who had influenced her when she was a student helped connect her with the job.
Years later, some of Cholovich’s former students have gone on to theater and acting programs of their own.
“Seeing that legacy passed from one generation to the next has been gratifying,” she says.
Finding room to create
Cholovich also found opportunities in Chattanooga that differed from those she’d encountered in New York.
She’s directed for the Chattanooga Theatre Centre, written shows and produced performances in collaboration with other arts organizations.
New York, she says, gave her the chance to experience an enormous range of work. Chattanooga gave her room to make it.
“Coming back here, I’ve found boundless opportunities because there’s not the same saturation you see in New York,” she says. “You get to play around a bit more.”
One project exemplified the kind of work Cholovich had come to value.
Working with Next Exit Productions, Scenic City Shakespeare and the Chattanooga Festivals of Black Arts and Ideas, she helped produce Ishmael Reed’s “The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda,” a response to the Broadway musical “Hamilton.”
The locally produced show ran at Howard School while the touring production of “Hamilton” was playing at Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Auditorium.
For Cholovich, the appeal was in creating something locally that engaged with a broader cultural conversation.
That same creative impulse eventually drew her to stand-up.
Finding comedy
Part of stand-up’s appeal for Cholovich is that the work is rarely finished.
A comedian can arrive at an open mic with little more than an idea, put it in front of an audience and discover what happens. Other comics might suggest a tag or point out what worked – or what didn’t.
“You’re jotting down notes and trying out new material,” she says. “You might not have a fully fleshed-out idea, but you’ll get onstage in front of 20 people and see what happens. You see what sticks.”
Her own life supplies plenty of material.
Sobriety, getting sober, identity and family can all find their way into Cholovich’s comedy. She describes her former self as a “filthy drunk” – a phrase her mother would prefer she didn’t use.
Like many comedians, Cholovich draws from the gap between experience and perception: how she sees the world, how she sees herself and how she imagines other people see her.
“How I see myself, who I am now, who I want to be and how I want other people to see me,” she says. “Those are all different characters.”
For someone who began her career studying acting, it’s a fitting way of describing the raw material of stand-up.
And when asked for a joke clean enough to print in a newspaper, Cholovich had one ready.
“My aunts are always asking me why I’m not married to some nice doctor yet,” she says. “And I tell them it’s because I eat too many apples. It keeps them away.”
She also has a less newspaper-friendly tag.
“Also because I’m a huge bitch,” she laughs.
Smart and dumb
Cholovich describes the comedy she enjoys as both “smart and dumb.”
She likes references that reward a little specialized knowledge, only to take that knowledge somewhere ridiculous.
One idea she’s developing involves an orange-cat witch instead of the traditional black-cat variety.
Developing the premise has sent her digging through witch lore and Shakespeare and, by a route that probably makes sense only in a comedian’s notebook, to a cauldron that produces lasagna.
All that scholarship, ultimately, is in service of a Garfield joke.
That combination of the esoteric and the silly appeals to her.
“I love a good reference,” she says. “But there’s usually some silly take or observation that brings it back down to earth.”
Increasingly, Cholovich’s work in comedy has extended beyond developing her own material.
She’s involved with Lookout Comedy, an independent stand-up organization founded by local comedians that incorporated as a nonprofit in 2025. Rather than operating from a permanent club, the organization takes comedy into venues around the region, from bars and restaurants to libraries.
The model allows Lookout Comedy to create stage time for performers who might not fit into the limited number of slots available at traditional comedy clubs.
With grant support, the organization has also expanded its monthly showcases and is able to pay participating comics and provide them with video footage they can use to pursue other bookings.
For Cholovich, it’s another version of an idea she discovered years ago as a young actor: Sometimes the way to find creative opportunities is to make them.
So she keeps making them – for herself, for other artists and for Chattanooga. And somewhere in one of those notebooks, there’s probably another idea waiting to take shape.