Louis Colaianni

Adjunct Instructor in Drama

Louis Colaianni is a master teacher of voice, speech, dialects, and classical acting. He recently served as Vocal Coach for Will Ferrell in the Broadway show, You’re Welcome, America. Professor Colaianni’s books, The Joy of Phonetics, Bringing Speech to Life and How to Speak Shakespeare are widely used in actor training. He has taught in Theatre programs throughout the country and abroad. He is a member of the faculty of the Actors Studio MFA program where he teaches Acting Classics. His professional credits include: Voice and Text Director, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Voice, Speech and Dialect Coach Utah Shakespearean Festival, Seattle Rep, Milwaukee Rep, Arizona Theatre Company, Trinity Rep, Shakespeare Santa Cruz, and the McCarter Theatre. For fifteen years he was Resident Voice and Speech Coach at Kansas City Repertory Theatre. He has coached actors for Broadway productions of August Osage County, The Overwhelming, and Is He Dead? and was Dialect Coach for The Little Flower of East Orange at the LAByrinth Theatre, directed by Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Colaianni is an adjunct Associate Professor at Pace University, and Syracuse University. He recently taught workshops at University of the Arts Helsinki Finland, and the Linklater Center of Germany in Munich.