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We rely on the generous support of people like you to sustain our tradition of artistic excellence, and secure a bright future for our Company.

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Shakespeare And Co Ma Actor Training In Circle

Our Actor Training Faculty

Susan Dibble (Interim Director)

Susan Dibble is a choreographer, dancer, teacher and painter. She graduated from SUNY College at Purchase with a B.F.A. in Dance in 1976. In 1979, Susan was a participant in the first Shakespeare & Company January Intensive. Susan is a founding member of Shakespeare & Company where she has worked for the past 39 years as a master teacher of movement and dance for actors, movement director and choreographer. In 1987, after teaching at a variety of universities including NYU more

Tina Packer

Tina Packer is the founding artistic director of Shakespeare & Company. She has directed most of Shakespeare’s plays (some of them several times), acted in seven of them (never when directing) and taught the whole canon one way or another at over thirty colleges in the U.S., including Harvard, M.I.T. and NYU. At Columbia, she taught in the M.B.A. program for four years, resulting in the publication of her piece, Power Plays: Shakespeare’s Lessons in Leadership and Management with Deming moreTina Packer is the founding artistic director of Shakespeare & Company. She has directed most of Shakespeare’s plays (some of them several times), acted in seven of them (never when directing) and taught the whole canon one way or another at over thirty colleges in the U.S., including Harvard, M.I.T. and NYU. At Columbia, she taught in the M.B.A. program for four years, resulting in the publication of her piece, Power Plays: Shakespeare’s Lessons in Leadership and Management with Deming Professor John Whitney. For Scholastic, she wrote Tales from Shakespeare, a children’s book and recipient of the Parent’s Gold Medal Award. She began her career in England, having trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where she won the Ronson Award for most Outstanding Actor. Following this, she became an associate artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company, performing at Stratford, in the West End, and on tour. She has worked at The Royal Court in London; Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leicester, Coventry and Hornchurch repertory companies. For BBC Television, she played Dora to Ian McKellen’s David Copperfield, was a love interest for Patrick Troughton’s Doctor Who (which she has never lived down), and also performed in several other TV plays and series. She came to the U.S. in 1974 when the Ford Foundation funded an eleven-month project for her to research the visceral roots of Elizabethan theater with five master teachers (Kristin Linklater, John Barton, B.H. Barry, John Broome, Trish Arnold), fifteen actors, and three managers. Out of these projects led by Tina throughout England and the US, her work has translated into the aesthetic and practical methods that Shakespeare & Company is based on, and still practices to this day. Tina then received two grants from the Ford Foundation to travel the world, looking at the relationship of mind, body, sacred texts, stand-up comedy, voice, and actor–audience relationship in her studies. The current company was founded in 1978 at Edith Wharton’s derelict mansion in Lenox, far from the cities of New York and London. Tina has returned to acting from time to time, most notably as Edith Wharton and a two-year stretch as Shirley Valentine, playing in Lenox, Boston and Louisville, and Lettice in Lettice and Lovage. For the Boston Shakespeare Company, she directed a season of twelve Irish plays, including the U.S. premiere of Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme. She has received the state of Massachusetts’s highest honor, The Commonwealth Award, and has six honorary degrees (which gives her great pleasure as she never went to regular college). During the mid-90’s, Tina conceived the idea for Women of Will, and subsequently received grants from the Guggenheim and Bunting fellowships to fund the project. This collaboration resulted in its first incarnation, at that time. In 2009, desperate to get back to WoW, Tina gave up the artistic directorship—though Shakespeare & Company remains her creative home and passion. She began work, first with Nigel Gore and then joined by Eric Tucker, to bring Women of Will to its present form of one Overview and five separate performances. This is Tina’s seventh creative collaboration with Nigel (including playing George and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) and she would like to acknowledge the power of their work together over the past six years. Her book Women of Will: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare’s Plays was released in 2015.

Kevin G. Coleman

Kevin is a founding member of Shakespeare & Company, a member of its Board and is involved in all three branches of the company: he acts, directs, teaches and choreographs in the Performance Program, he is one of the master teachers in the Training Program, (teaching Basics, Text, Stage Combat, Clown and Wit), and serves as the director of Shakespeare & Company’s Education Program. Since 1979 he directed most of the Northeast Regional Tour productions (reaching schools, colleges and moreKevin is a founding member of Shakespeare & Company, a member of its Board and is involved in all three branches of the company: he acts, directs, teaches and choreographs in the Performance Program, he is one of the master teachers in the Training Program, (teaching Basics, Text, Stage Combat, Clown and Wit), and serves as the director of Shakespeare & Company’s Education Program. Since 1979 he directed most of the Northeast Regional Tour productions (reaching schools, colleges and performance venues across New England, New Jersey and New York). Under Kevin’s leadership, the artists of Shakespeare & Company’s Education Program have developed such programs as: Shakespeare & Young Company, (an intensive summer training program for 17-20 year olds); Riotous Youth, (a recurring 2-week-long summer program for 7-9, 10-12 and 13-15 year olds); Shakespeare in the Courts, (a collaboration with Berkshire County Juvenile Court, as well as the Probation Department where juvenile offenders and those in need of special services work with Shakespeare & Company artists to rehearse and perform Shakespeare as an obligation to the Court); Professional Development Workshops (for directors, teaching artists and teachers) and most notably, the Fall Festival of Shakespeare, now in its 28th year (over 250 Shakespeare productions) where students from 10 Massachusetts and eastern New York high schools annually present full productions of Shakespeare in their own schools, and then collectively during a week-long celebration in the Tina Packer Playhouse. In the Performance season, Kevin has acted in numerous productions (most recently the Fool in King Lear), directed several Shakespeare plays (most recently Winter’s Tale), as well as readings, adaptations, (several of Dennis Krausnick’s Edith Wharton adaptations), many modern and contemporary plays, and developed the 7 actor performance piece, Shakespeare and the Language that Shaped a World. He has choreographed numerous mainstage fights, and works with the clowns. Outside of Shakespeare & Company, Kevin serves as the Theatre Director at the Austen Riggs Center where he teaches and has directed over 30 productions. He has taught, directed or been a guest artist at the American Stage Company, Shenandoah Shakespeare, the Shakespeare Theatre Association (STA), MIT, Harvard, UMass/Boston, UW/Madison, Columbia, Tulane, LSU, UCDavis, DePauw, U. of Akron, SUNY/Albany, Stanford, Queensland University of Technology-Brisbane, Lincoln Center, the Folger, both Stratfords (UK and Ontario), and the Mercury Theatre in Colchester, UK. Kevin has served as a Project Director for both the NEH and NEA. Shakespeare & Company’s Education Program has been recognized by the President’s Council on the Arts and Humanities, the MacArthur Foundation and the GE Foundation as a “Champion of Change” in Arts in Learning. Shakespeare & Company’s Education Program received the Commonwealth Award, the highest honor awarded for the Arts by the state of Massachusetts. In 2009, Kevin received the Distinguished Theatre Artist award from the Massachusetts Alliance for Arts Education, and in 2006,Shakespeare in the Courts; a program he created in collaboration with Judge Paul E. Perachi received the “Coming Up Taller” award at the White House. In 2016, he was the runner-up for the Tony Award for Education. Kevin holds degrees from St. Louis University and NYU.

Sarah Kate Anderson

Sarah Kate is an actor, director, and theatre educator who teaches in the Film and Theatre Department at San José State University. She has taught a variety of classes, ranging from Classical Acting and Acting for Animation Majors, to Theatre Appreciation and Voice and Movement for the Actor at various institutions including De Anza Community College and The Art Institute in Sunnyvale. She is a graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, completed her Bachelor's in Theatre Arts from more

Ariel Bock

Ariel is the Producing Associate at Shakespeare & Company. Roles include: Rose in The Children, Mom in Ugly Lies the Bone, Mistress Quickly in Henry IV pts 1&2, Goneril in King Lear, Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, Elizabeth in Richard III, Audrey in As You Like it, Hippolyta in Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, Mistress Quickly in Merry Wives of Windsor, Paulina in The Winters Tale, Ruth in Private Eyes, the Woman in Laughing Wild, more

Sheila Bandyopadhyay

Sheila Bandyopadhyay is a Brooklyn-based director, deviser, movement specialist, and Alexander Technique and yoga teacher. Sheila started training and teaching with Shakespeare & Company over twenty years ago and currently serves as Head of the Movement Department at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Manhattan. Additional teaching and coaching with: the Balance Arts Center (Freedom to Act), FSU/Asolo Conservatory for Actor Training, NYU Gallatin, the Linklater Center, the Upright Citizen’s Brigade, and Emerson College. In New York, Sheila has more

Andrew Borthwick-Leslie

Andrew Borthwick-Leslie is a member of Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, MA, where he has taught, directed, and acted for twenty years. He is also the co-Artistic Director of The Humanist Project in NYC. He has taught acting and voice at the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, Emerson College, DeSales University and the University of Maryland among others. Andrew has run workshops for the Center for Renaissance Studies, the American Bar Association, the New England Homeless Veterans shelter and many more

Jenna May Cass

Jenna May found her way to Shakespeare & Company while training in Linklater Voice. After taking both the Month-Long Intensive and the Conservatory in 2012, she immediately returned to begin teacher training, ultimately falling in love with the sonnet progression, which she now teaches, along with text. Originally from Washington State, Jenna May earned a degree in dramatic arts from Western Washington University, trained further with RADA, Theatricum Botanicum, Louis Colaianni, and Natsuko Ohama. Now based in the Berkshires, Jenna more

Merry Conway

Merry Conway is a teacher, and performer. She teaches workshops in a range of subjects: Movement for Actors, Clown, and has developed original pedagogy on The Embodied Humors, Wit and Wordplay and The Fool. Merry trained with Trish Arnold in London and her work has continued to provide a strong foundation for Merry’s thought. Merry is a Founding Teacher at Shakespeare & Company, having taught at the first January workshop, bringing movement as well as Clown into the Company pedagogy, more

Mary Mayo

Mary is a Designated Linklater teacher with many years experience acting and teaching voice, acting and improvisation in universities and professional theatre training programs all over the United States including Shakespeare & Company, University of Maryland, NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, University of Mississippi, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Syracuse University. She has an M.Litt/MFA in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature in Performance from Mary Baldwin College and the American Shakespeare Center. Mary has coached voice and dialects at Arena Stage, more

Paul D'Agostino

Paul D’Agostino is an assistant professor of theater at Boston Conservatory at Berklee, where he’s been on faculty since 2014. Additionally, he serves as the resident voice teacher for Commonwealth Shakespeare Company and Boston University Summer Theater Institute (both since 2013). A Designated Linklater Teacher and a certified teacher of The Alexander Technique, he holds a Master of Music in Musical Theater from The Boston Conservatory and an M.F.A. in Theatre Education with a concentration in voice and more

Dave Demke

Dave Demke is a Shakespeare & Company Senior Faculty member and a
Designated Linklater Voice teacher. He received his BA in Theatre Arts
from Minnesota State University, and MFA in Performance from the
University of Maryland. He was the Artistic Director of Stark Raving Theatre
in Portland, OR; the Associate Director of Training for Shakespeare &
Company; and principle dancer/choreographer for the Red River Dance
Company in Fargo, ND. As an actor he has appeared in productions in New
York more

Tom Giordano

Tom Giordano is an actor, teacher and director based in New York City. His training as an actor at the Shakespeare & Company January Intensive was the springboard to receiving his MFA from Columbia University. While at Columbia, he trained extensively in voice and Shakespeare with Kristin Linklater and Andrea Haring, inspiring him to pursue and complete his designation as a teacher of Linklater Voice. He has worked in the Education and Training programs at Shakespeare more

Rebecca Kemper Goodheart

Rebecca Kemper Goodheart has been a director, actor, and teacher specializing in Shakespeare and Voice for over 25 years. She is a Designated Linklater Voice teacher who has directed over 30 professional and 50 educational productions. Currently serving as the Producing Director of Elm Shakespeare Company in New Haven, CT, she has worked with a dozen Shakespeare theaters around the world, and is a proud lifetime member of the Shakespeare Theatre Association. Other leadership positions have included Director of Training more

Charls Sedgwick Hall

Charls Sedgwick Hall (Actor, Movement Teacher, Director) ) Charls’s acting credits include performances in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged, Revised), Romeo and Juliet, A Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Shakespeare & Company; The Color Purple (The Musical) Los Angeles Ovations Award winning production, The Next Fairytale, The Escape Artist’s Children, and Follow with Celebration Theatre; Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing with Southern California Shakespeare Festival; moreCharls Sedgwick Hall (Actor, Movement Teacher, Director) ) Charls’s acting credits include performances in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged, Revised), Romeo and Juliet, A Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Shakespeare & Company; The Color Purple (The Musical) Los Angeles Ovations Award winning production, The Next Fairytale, The Escape Artist’s Children, and Follow with Celebration Theatre; Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing with Southern California Shakespeare Festival; Uncle Vanya, As You Like It, The Vigil with RAAP Theater Company; A Christmas Carol, The Little Foxes, Cymbeline, Cyrano, with A Noise Within; Angels of Lemnos, David and Goliath in America, Hitler’s Head, The Lady’s Not For Burning with The Road Theatre Company; Tartuffe and Arms and The Man with The Classical Theatre Company; Twelfth Night and Saint Joan with The Royston Theater Company; as well as productions of Faith and The Good Thing, Our Country’s Good, Three Sisters, Death Unit, Measure For Measure, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Firebugs. The Tempest, The Taming of the Shrew and Exit The King. Directing credits include Other World Lover and Afrocentricities with MPAACT, OUTStories and The Red Train Café with Celebration Theatre. During his many years of performing and studying with Shakespeare & Company, Charls toured with the School’s Program and trained as a Movement teacher in the discipline of Trish Arnold. He has taught as a Guest Professor in Movement at the National Institute of Performing Arts in Sydney, Australia; a Guest Professor in Movement and a Guest Artist performing in Angels of Lemnos at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and held the position of Director of Training/Movement Instructor with Two Pence Theatre Company. Charls, a proud member of Actors’ Equity Association, holds an MFA from the NYU-School of the Performing Arts Graduate Acting Program, teaches and continues to study other Movement disciplines, as well as Shakespeare’s Text, Rhetoric and Sonnets.

Rory Hammond

Rory has studied Shakespeare her entire life and has also worked as an Education Artist at Shakespeare & Company since 2015. She has spent the last three years focusing on directing and teaching Shakespeare to kids from ages 7-18. Directing Credits: Twelfth Night, Much Ado about Nothing, and Macbeth for the Fall Festival of Shakespeare. New York acting credits include: Pericles, directed by Edward Berkeley at SoHo Rep, Measure for Measure at Circle in the Square also more

Sarah Hickler

Sarah Hickler is an actor, deviser, director and theater educator. She has directed, choreographed and taught with the Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Co., Sedona Shakespeare, Sun Valley Shakespeare, and Actor’s Shakespeare Project. She is an Associate Professor and Head of Acting at Emerson College in Boston, where she teaches Movement, Action Theater and Shakespeare. Sarah has an MFA from Boston University and is a Certified in Authentic Movement facilitation and Action Theater™. Sarah has a long association with Shakespeare & Co., more

Tom Jaeger

Tom Jaeger has been teaching, acting, training, managing and directing at Shakespeare & Company since 1991. Before coming here he trained at Washington University in St. Louis with Hollis Huston, a Lecoq trained theatre maker and performance theorist. While in St. Louis he was also the managing director of the Holy Roman Repertory Company, a live radio theatre. He has also done stints at MIT and Harvard, including the first Shakespeare production done in the Sanders Theatre at Harvard in more

Edgar Landa

Edgar Landa is an actor/director from Los Angeles. He also creates fights & violence for theatres large and small. He has been a guest director at Off Square Theatre/Thin Air Shakespeare for the past five summers. He has directed at theatres in L.A. and beyond and has also been a guest director at USC, Long Beach State University and Loyola Marymount University. As a fight director Edgar has created mayhem at numerous theatres across Southern California and elsewhere including: more

Paula Langton

Paula Langton - Actor and Designated Linklater Voice Teacher - is honored to return to teach at Shakespeare & Company where she encountered powerful teaching mentors, including Master Voice Teacher, Kristin Linklater, who was in residence when she participated in her first "intensive" in 1986. It was here that Paula received some of the most transformational training of her career. She is currently an Associate Professor on The School of Theatre faculty at Boston University where she has taught since morePaula Langton - Actor and Designated Linklater Voice Teacher - is honored to return to teach at Shakespeare & Company where she encountered powerful teaching mentors, including Master Voice Teacher, Kristin Linklater, who was in residence when she participated in her first "intensive" in 1986. It was here that Paula received some of the most transformational training of her career. She is currently an Associate Professor on The School of Theatre faculty at Boston University where she has taught since 1996 and served as Head of Acting for the past 20 years. Paula met Shakespeare & Company in the early 80s as an actor in training and was a member of the company's elementary schools program. In the late 80s, she became part of a motley crew of clowns, then called "Shakessquad & Clown Company" where she spent countless summer hours fooling about, devising and performing original, comedic material with and for the company. Paula apprenticed directly with Kristin Linklater for over three years and served as her assistant, and then, successor, for Shakespeare & Company's NEH funded Shakespeare Institute - (actor/ teacher training for high school teachers.) She was officially designated by Linklater to teach voice in 1991 and last taught voice at Shakespeare & Company's month long intensive in January of 2003. She joined Kristin Linklater at Emerson College in 1991 as a full time Artist in Residence for five years, where she assisted in the development of the acting program under Linklater's direction. She occasionally co-teaches with Linklater at The Kristin Linklater Voice Centre in Orkney, Scotland. Other teaching credits include: Trinity Rep Conservatory, University of Massachusetts, Wheaton College, Actors' Shakespeare Project, and Festa Di Teatro Ecologico, in Stromboli Italy. Paula's acting credits include: Shakespeare & Company's mainstage at The Mount where she played in The Tempest, at The Tina Packer Playhouse in Much Ado About Nothing, Love's Labour's Lost, & Mother Courage, and she has twice had the joy of being invited to be a part of DibbleDance. She was a member of Kristin Linklater and Carol Gilligan's all female Shakespeare company- Company of Women, and was director of the Company of Girls..Other acting credits include productions with American Repertory Theatre, La Mama etc, Actors Shakespeare Project, Potomac Theatre Co. NYC, LA Women's Shakespeare, The Olney Theatre, New Rep, Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theatre, The Charles Playhouse, Boston Theatre Works, Boston Playwrights Theatre, and Festa Di Teatro Eco Logico, to name a few. Paula has a band called The Crazy Neighbors, and is a member of Actor's Equity Association, Screen Actors Guild and Voice and Speech Trainers Association, Inc.

Corinna May

Corinna is a 30-year member of Shakespeare & Company, took her first Intensive in 1990, went on the education tour right afterwards, and has been working here ever since both as an actor (33+ roles and counting), and faculty member in and Education. Corinna has acted in NY and regional theatre in classical, modern, and new plays, appeared in film, on television, in radio plays and audio books. She stars in the indie feature Split Ends, directed by Dorothy moreCorinna is a 30-year member of Shakespeare & Company, took her first Intensive in 1990, went on the education tour right afterwards, and has been working here ever since both as an actor (33+ roles and counting), and faculty member in and Education. Corinna has acted in NY and regional theatre in classical, modern, and new plays, appeared in film, on television, in radio plays and audio books. She stars in the indie feature Split Ends, directed by Dorothy Lyman, & spent two years on the Broadway tour of The Graduate, with Jerry Hall, Linda Gray, Lorraine Bracco, Kelly McGillis and Morgan Fairchild as the various Missus Robinsons. TV includes “House of Cards” and “Law & Order”. Her one-woman play Dancing With The Czar was produced at Ventfort Hall in Lenox, MA. As a fight director, Corinna has staged fights for both classical and contemporary plays. She studied stage fighting with S&Co’s Founding Master Fight Teacher, BH Barry while training at Circle in the Square Theatre School, and then with her mentor, Shakespeare & Company’s Master Fight Teacher Tony Simotes. She has also trained with the Society of American Fight Directors and with Fight Directors Canada. Corinna is a Designated Linklater Method voice teacher and a Feldenkrais Method practitioner, one of only a handful of people in the world to hold both certifications. Currently serving as an adjunct assistant professor of Voice & Speech at the Actors Studio Drama School MFA program at Pace University, she has also taught at Smith, MIT, Syracuse University, a couple of SUNYs, Fordham, the National Theatre Institute and Circle-in-the-Square Theatre School. Corinna is a lead trainer with the international consulting company, The Cornell Voice Advisory/Australia. Her own private coaching practice serves actors, teachers, lawyers, executives, politicians, academics and clergy. She is a proud Union member: AEA, SAG-AFTRA, UAFP, Dramatists Guild; she’s a graduate of Barnard College, and Circle-in-the-Square Theatre School. She has recently begun taking workshops in staging theatrical intimacy with Intimacy Directors International, and is passionate about helping to integrate this excellent and thrilling work into every aspect of the performing arts.

Jane Nichols

Jane Nichols is an actress, director, and teacher. She first studied with Shakespeare & Company in 1983, and has taught and acted with the Company off and on since then. Inspired by the work of Merry Conway at the 1983 workshop, Jane developed a passion for Clowning. Her teaching today brings together skills and techniques of Le Jeu, Physical Comedy, Clown, Bouffon, Improvisation, and Mask.

In addition to Merry Conway, she has studied with Philippe Gaulier (Ecole Gaulier), Clive

In addition to Merry Conway, she has studied with Philippe Gaulier (Ecole Gaulier), Clive Mendes (Theatre Complicite), Ronlin Foreman (DellArte School of Physical Theatre), Michael Kennard (co-founder of Canada’s Mump & Smoot, and Master teacher of the Richard Pochinko native American mask/clown technique), Avner Eisenberg (Avner the Eccentric), Davis Robinson (author of Physical Comedy Handbook), Keith Johnstone (Impro and Impro for Storytellers), and world-renowned Czech clown, Bolek Polivka.

Before S&Co, Jane worked as an actress in Boston, and was the Founder/Artistic Director of Crosswalk Theatre for Children. In 1985, applying her knowledge of children’s theatre to Shakespeare, Jane created and implemented the curriculum for the S&Co Elementary and Jr High School program which continues to this day.

In addition to S&Co, Jane has held teaching positions at the Yale School of Drama; Juilliard; Harvard University; ART; ACT; Brown University; the Actors Center in NYC; Stella Adler Conservatory; Emerson College; Simon’s Rock College of Bard, and University of Washington.

She has directed shows at Harvard University, Brown University, Washington Ensemble Theatre (WET), Intiman Theatre, Seattle Shakespeare Co, Seattle University, Cornish College of the Arts, and Room Circus Medical Clowning. With her company of former clown students, Logic Limited, Ltd., she devised: Desdemona’s Dream; Schaden, Freude, and You: A 3 Clown Seminar; TiVO la Resistance; New Shorts; and A Night at the Trojan Wall: a Clown version of the Iliad. For Cirque du Soleil she worked with John Gilkey, Daniel Passer, and Wayne Wilson to develop and devise the cabaret Your New Best Friends.

Acting credits include roles at Dallas Theatre Center, Portland Stage Co, En Garde Arts, Synapse Productions, New Georges, Shakespeare & Company, Gloucester Stage Co, Nora Theatre, Lyric Stage, Berkshire Public, Counterpoint Theatre, Cambridge Theatre Co. Film and TV credits include: School Ties; Heights; The Living Room Waltz; Ed; Law & Order SVU; America’s Most Wanted; Connect With English; and Rachel’s Dinner with Olympia Dukakis. She has done numerous voice overs and commercials.

Natsuko Ohama

One of the premier voice teachers in the world, Natsuko trained under legendary Master Kristin Linklater at the Working Theatre in New York. She is a founding member and permanent faculty of Shakespeare & Company (Lenox, MA), a senior artist at Pan Asian Rep NewYork, a certified Joy of Phonetics teacher trained by Louis Colaianni and was the Director of Training at the National Arts Center of Canada. She has taught at numerous institutions all over North America, including NYU, more

Marie Ramirez Downing

Marie is thrilled to be joining the voice faculty of Shakespeare & Company. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts, Performance (Acting, Voice and Movement) at Sonoma State University in the North Bay of California. She has an M.F.A. in Acting from The Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago, a B.A. in Theatre Arts, Acting from California State University, Fresno and is a Designated Linklater Voice Teacher (Shakespeare & Company 2012). Marie is also a Bronze Founding moreMarie is thrilled to be joining the voice faculty of Shakespeare & Company. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts, Performance (Acting, Voice and Movement) at Sonoma State University in the North Bay of California. She has an M.F.A. in Acting from The Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago, a B.A. in Theatre Arts, Acting from California State University, Fresno and is a Designated Linklater Voice Teacher (Shakespeare & Company 2012). Marie is also a Bronze Founding Member of the Linklater Centre in Orkney, Scotland where she has continued her training as a voice teacher and actor studying Voice and Speech with Louis Colaianni (creator of Phonetic Pillows) and Kristin Linklater in 2018. In April 2021, she will participate in “An International Story Exchange at the Centre in Orkney under Patrice Johnson Chevannes, Paula Langton, and Kenneth Cheeseman. Marie was an instructor at California State University, Chico for 5 years where she taught Acting and Social Wellness, Theatre Politics Performance and Power, Performance of Identity, Foundations of Acting and Movement for the Actor. She was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Voice and Movement at Texas Tech University School of Theatre and Dance and a Guest Lecturer of Voice, Speech and Presentation skills at U.C. Berkeley, Santa Clara University, The Chicago College of the Performing Arts and The Theatre School at DePaul University. Marie has been an advocate for, and committed to California State University, Summer Arts and coordinated a new course entitled, Performance of Identity: Past and Present Voices Meet for the of Summer 2021. The course will explore heighten text, lyrical and personal spoken word performance, and feature Award-Winning Latinx playwright Octavio Solis, Lisa Wolpe - actor and founder of the all-female, multi-cultural Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company, Natsuko Ohama, Linklater Voice, and Sheila Bandyopadhyay- Movement as guest artists. Marie has presented identity and heritage, voice and acting workshops at The Association for Theatre in Higher Education, The Voice and Speech Trainers Association, The Southern Theatre Conference, and The Western Academy of Management. She is an elected member of the Board of Directors for The Voice and Speech Trainers Association (VASTA), a member of the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee, and a Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival co-coordinator of The VASTA VOCAL EXCELLENCE AWARD as part of the VASTA Engagement committee.

Victoria Rhoades

Victoria Rhoades, PhD is an educator, actor and director, specializing in Shakespeare and girls’ and boys’ development. Tori is a senior faculty of Movement and Text in the Training Program and has worked for years in various areas of the Education Program. She currently serves as founder and Executive Director of the newly developing, SAGE Center, (Shakespeare, the Arts, Gender and Education). Tori strives to create spaces where young women and men can respectfully and playfully learn from, and alongside more

Rebecca Schneebaum

Rebecca Schneebaum is a Boston based actor, Designated Linklater Voice Teacher, and loving dog mama with a focus on making voice training accessible for all humans. In this fraught and scary world, Rebecca strives to build community, understanding, and activism through communication. It was at Shakespeare & Company’s training intensive many summers ago that Rebecca encountered the profound impact the voice work can have and from there she dove head first into teacher training. She currently teaches voice at Emerson more

Gwendolyn Schwinke

Gwendolyn Schwinke has served as voice and text coach at Shakespeare & Company for The Merry Wives of Windsor, Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Or, Ugly Lies the Bone, The Comedy of Errors, Hamlet, The Unexpected Man and Shakespeare and the Language that Shaped a World, and created and directed Worse than Wolves for Henry VI.6. She is Resident Vocal Coach for PlayMakers Repertory Company and teaches voice in the MFA program at more

Michael F. Toomey

Michael has been company member at Shakespeare & Company for nearly twenty years where he is an actor, director and faculty member. He is the Co-Artistic Director of the NYC based theatre company The Humanist Project. He also a founding member and trustee of Split Knuckle Theatre, which devises new works of theatre and is currently touring throughout the world with recent performances in Bangkok, Athens and Paris. Michael has been a Visiting Assistant Professor at Binghamton University teaching Clown, more

Kevin Vavasseur

Kevin Vavasseur is a theater artist whose credits include work at Highways Performance Space, Theater @ Boston Court, Odyssey Theater, Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company, H.E.R.E, Company of Angels, Los Angeles Theater Center, Sacred Fools, Edinburgh International Arts Festival, New York International Fringe Festival, London Shakespeare Studio and Lincoln Center. An NAACP Image, GLAAD Media and Los Angeles Drama Critics’ Circle Award nominee for acting, he is a Lincoln Center Directors' Lab alum and a Stage Directors and Choreographers Union more

Claire Warden

Claire Warden first came to Shakespeare & Company in 2008, having relocated from the UK, taking the Rhetoric and Month-Long Intensive workshops. After a few years establishing herself in New York City and building her acting and teaching career across America, she returned in 2013 to begin teacher training in the company’s fight work. In 2016 she joined the faculty as a Fight and Text teacher. Along with teaching for Shakespeare & Company, she also teaches Acting, Fight and Verse more

Sarah Weatherwax

Sarah Weatherwax, originally from the US, has an honours BFA in Acting from Emerson College. She now lives with her family in Toronto. Along with private voice/audition coaching, she's worked as an on-set acting coach and taught at various places: Humber College Comedy Program; Workman Arts, a company devoted to fine arts training for people struggling with addiction and/or mental illness; Shakespeare & Company in Massachusetts; and Straeon Acting Studios in Toronto, Montreal and Boston. She's done voice work on more

Ryan Winkles

Ryan Winkles has been a company member at Shakespeare & Company since 2006 as an actor, fight choreographer, and teacher. He has acted in, or choreographed stage fight for, over 30 productions with S&Co, the majority of which were productions of Shakespeare plays. He has taught in the Summer Training Institute, the January Intensive, and nearly every S&Co Education program.

Apart from S&Co he has acted in productions from one side of Massachusetts to the other with companies more

Kristin Wold

Kristin Wold first trained and acted with Shakespeare & Company in 1987, playing Cobweb in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Abhorson in Measure for Measure. Acting roles with the company since then include Shakespeare’s Will (Anne Hathaway), Julius Caesar (Portia, Calpurnia, Lucius), King Lear (Regan), Dibbledance (Dancer), The Tempest (Ariel), The Memory of Water (Teresa), Sea Marks (Timothea), Othello (Emilia), Ice Glen (Sarah), King Lear (Cordelia), Twelfth Night (Viola), Measure For Measure (Isabella), Berkeley Square (Helen), Macbeth (Witch, Lady Macduff), more

Dennis Krausnick (1942-2018)

Dennis Krausnick was a founder of Shakespeare & Company and served as its Director of Training from 1993 to 2018. Krausnick was central to the creation and development of the Company’s internationally acclaimed actor training programs. He also developed a number of training programs utilizing theater training methods for corporate and other non-theater clientele. Krausnick held an MA from St. Louis University and an MFA in Acting from NYU. As a Master Teacher of text and rhetoric, Krausnick provided residencies and more

From the Alumni

Jenna Hoff

All of the vocal and physical training we did enabled me to see how much freedom and availability are possible, which raised my expectations of myself. But for the first time I felt that I had the tools to move forward with those expectations. I can hone, clarify and broaden my Shakespeare monologues (and other pieces, too!), and I gained more

Lulu Fogarty

My experience at the 2007 Summer Training Institute was absolutely priceless….I learned to bring a sense of play to everything I do. Play might be the most important tool for an actor but it’s surprising how quickly we forget to play because we try to be ‘right.’ There is no such thing as ‘right.’ To me, this is what the more

Teresa Spencer

The most important thing I’ve taken from the Conservatory has been a sense of professionalism. I used to consistently walk into auditions feeling the terror of unpreparedness: even if I’d rehearsed my monologue or sides forwards and backwards, I would arrive at an audition and suddenly feel overtaken with a sense of not knowing what the hell I was doing, more

Maura Matarese

I attend at least one workshop at Shakespeare & Company each year as it always allows me an opportunity to grow as actor, to continue to free my actor’s instrument, to meet exciting new artists from around the world, and to spend time in an environment I love, with a faculty whom I deeply respect. more

Halima Henderson

I’ve kept busy over the past year, and I have to say that weekend intensive has proven to be very effective! Everyone always asks about it when they see it on my resume and I love waxing poetically about it! Not only that, friendships that I made during my weekend have been long-lasting, I love running into folks at auditions more

Shakespeare & Company is a professional live theatre company in the heart of the Berkshires, presenting a vibrant summer performance season featuring the works of Shakespeare in repertory with classic and contemporary plays. The Company offers one of the most extensive actor training programs by a regional theatre in the country, and is also home to an award-winning and nationally recognized theatre-in-education program.