No official records exist to confirm the date, but Arun Cameron Storrs believes she was born around July 20, 1986, in Kathmandu, NepalAt just seven weeks old, she was adopted from Kathmandu’s Children’s Temple Orphanage. But her time in Nepal was far from over.
Her adoptive mother, Beth, had always felt something about mountains–they had a pull on her, so she kept returning to them. Nepal’s ancient mountains, the noble Himalayas, quickly captured her spirit, drawing her into a deep devotion to the trails and the life between them. She would always find her way back.
Back home in Portland, she shared slideshows of her journeys—the ridgelines, winding trails, and blissful experiences. At one such showing, a Nepali couple approached Beth and her husband, David. The couple told them about an orphanage in Nepal— the place where they would meet Arun and bring her into their lives.
The journey to adopt was not simple. Between stalled paperwork, endless translations, and months of uncertainty, Arun’s mother held on, waiting, until finally, Arun appeared.
She was named for the Tibetan Arun River and Valley, a reflection of her mother’s own treks: the aching climbs and endless exhaustion. When she finally reached the Arun valley, the land opened up, flat and forgiving, a place in which she could finally walk.
Arun describes her name as “a metaphor for her journey to get me.”
Arun grew up in South Eugene, OR. But Nepal was never far from her life. Her childhood was speckled with trips back to her birth place. Between the ages of 11 and 14, she traveled more regularly with her mother, each visit cementing her enduring connection to the country.
“I began to long for Nepal,” Arun says. “I remember saying, ‘I miss Nepal.’”
Each return offered Arun a window to look deeply at the contrast between her two worlds. She remembers thinking that her friends back home in Eugene were white, but she didn’t realize she wasn’t. After returning from one trip to Nepal, Arun had a moment of discovery, and a deeper understanding of who she was.
“ I remember I looked in the mirror and realized I wasn’t white,” she says. “It shocked me!”
Arun always knew she was adopted, but didn’t see herself as different from anyone else at home. She began to see the duality of the life she had and the life she could have had. This realization and understanding sparked a desire to give back.
“I sincerely have a lot of gratitude, and I’ll use what I have to help other people,” Arun says.
Alongside her early experiences with identity, she discovered a love for theater and creative pursuits. She got her first acting role as Wendy in a community theater production of Peter Pan. The stage became a space where she could explore herself and the world around her.
By high school, Arun had fully thrown herself into both social justice and theater. She loved school, and she was good at it. In theater, leading roles didn’t come often, but that didn’t matter much. She showed up for every ensemble production with the same energy and heart, eager to be part of something bigger than herself.
“I never thought about what my career would be. I did what brought me joy,” Arun says.
With time and her outstanding grades, Arun earned a generous scholarship to Yale University, where she studied Ethnicity, Race, and Migration alongside Theater. Acting was her passion, but it came with challenges: she was often typecast as “the other” rather than being considered for lead roles. Still, she persisted, driven by her love for the craft and joy it filled her with.
“Casting was when really when I felt my otherness, like no one sees me as part of the main cast, or a love interest, or anything like that,” she says.
By her junior year of college, Arun became involved in post-modern dance. She loved this art form, even when, again, top roles eluded her. Even amid rejection, her enthusiasm never wavered.
“Even small roles made me feel like I was part of a team,” she says. “Taking those lessons to heart and connecting with people gives me an endorphin high I don’t find anywhere else.”
Alongside her creative pursuits at Yale, Arun remained dedicated to advocacy. With the help of a public service grant from the university, she spent a summer in Nepal, working with Tibetan refugee children. Arun taught art classes and introduced a performance-based curriculum to engage the kids.
While in Nepal, Arun returned to the orphanage where she’d been adopted. But this time, she wasn’t a baby being taken home; she was a volunteer, hoping to give back to the place where her story began.
At first, it felt meaningful–surreal, even. She found herself volunteering in the very room where her mother had first seen her. But the deeper she looked, the harder it got. The babies were in rough shape. It was monsoon season, and the rooms were damp. The babies had rashes that wouldn’t heal. Bottles were being mixed with dirty water.
The staff were doing what they could, but they were overwhelmed, underpaid, and untrained.
What she thought would be a healing return turned into something much more complicated. She started to realize that her presence (like that of so many short-term volunteers) wasn’t fixing anything. If anything, it was helping to keep a broken system going.
Arun couldn’t shake what she’d seen. The way the system kept going, not because it was working—but because no one was stopping it. “I realized that non-profit work or one-off volunteer work is often not sustainable and I wanted to make it more sustainable,” she says.
She wanted to do something, so she did.
Arun started her own non-profit, The Kumari Project. Kumari means princess in Nepali, an ode to the belief that all children are equally deserving of such a title and respected and honored as if they were. The idea was both simple and ambitious: create a safe house where Nepalese orphans could grow up in a more stable, long-term environment. One with real nutrition, basic hygiene, and actual care, without the revolving door of foreign volunteers or the risks of exploitation.
It wasn’t about charity, really. It was about building something better than what she saw that day, in the room where her life had begun.
The Kumari Project took on 10 children, pledging to support them until they reached the age of independence. In Nepal, this “age” is undefined, more like the time when a young person can leave the home and become self-sufficient. Arun’s goal is simple, and not simple at all: that within the coming years, every one of those kids will be able to stand on their own.
“These kids have become like my little sisters and brothers,” she says. “It’s very hands-on and extremely individualized.”
While running the Kumari Project, Arun never forgot her passion for theater. She kept up with theater classes, learning how to audition and how to step into someone else’s story.
After graduation, she moved to Los Angeles to follow her dream of making it as an actress. In L.A., she didn’t have much, but she had a friend from college named Noah, who had moved to L.A. to pursue filmmaking. Arun crashed in his living room.
Arun and Noah had been “solidly friend-zoned” for years. But something started to shift. Maybe it was the timing. “Saturn Returns,” Arun says, “the stars realigning the same way they were when you were born.” Maybe it was just… time.
“I realized he was what I wanted in a partner,” Arun says.
Today, they’re happily married. They live in Los Angeles, where Arun continues her passion for acting. She started with commercials, landing major advertisements from big brands like Uber and Google Meet.
Eventually bigger roles came, feature films and hit TV shows. She landed a part in “Founders Day” and most recently the hit HBO series, “The Pit.”
It was slow, like everything that has been meaningful in Arun’s life. Fueled by purpose, and shaped by stories–both the ones she’s lived, and the ones she’s finally getting to tell.
Arun continues to live in the space between two worlds, advocacy and art, Nepal and the U.S.. She’s started working on a project not too different from her own story. It’s about a Nepali orphan’s journey back to their birthplace. Like all of her passions, she continues to connect with her identity through art.
“I want to use what I’ve been given to help other people,” she says.