Actress | Voice-over | Spokesperson | Print

Jan Brehm is a writer whose work explores memory, identity, family, faith, and the complicated inheritance of childhood. Her career in modeling gave her an unusual window into beauty, perception, and the ways women learn to see themselves through the eyes of others.

Growing up in the Northwest and graduating from the University of Oregon with a teaching degree, Jan never intended to choose acting as a career or even envisioned working in front of the camera, let alone on stage before hundreds of people. But for the last 40 years, that’s exactly where she has found herself . . . and loving every minute of it! Jan’s career has included and continues in stage, film, television, corporate video, radio, live show presentations, and print. 

Jan began as a model in 1981 and soon wound up in front of the camera in her first TV commercial in Eugene Oregon. Pursuing a career in acting, she studied at the Training Ground, now Portland Actors Conservatory and believes it was here she learned the solid fundamentals of acting which lead to the 1994 Cascade Awards Oregon Media Production Association’s “Judges Excellence In Achievement Award for Acting.”

With over 1,800 television commercials, Jan has the expertise needed to work both nationally and internationally. 

In Soul Weeds, she turns that gaze inward, examining the beliefs formed in childhood and the long process of reclaiming a sense of worth that had been buried beneath them.

In Soul Weeds, Jan Brehm learns from a childhood shaped by conditional love, an older brother’s cruelty, and a mother’s perfectionism, to the long descent into addiction and the grace of twenty-five years of sobriety. Her memoir traces the sacred work of healing through faith, honesty, and time.

With the candor of recovery and the poetry of redemption, Jan tells of her father’s contradictions, her gentle brother Mark, her sister Cheryl’s heartbreaking death, and the lifelong echoes of her older brother’s rage. Through shame, survival, and surrender, she discovers that no soil is too scorched for beauty to bloom again.

More than a story of recovery, Soul Weeds is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the relentless kindness of God.

It is a reminder that healing is not the absence of weeds, but the courage to keep tending the garden—one day, one truth, one seed of grace at a time.

For more information, visit JanBrehm.com