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Education

Fedra received her BA in theatre from the University of California-San Diego and her MFA in Acting from New York University. She has had the pleasure of being taught by teachers such as Deborah Lapidus, Jane Fujita, Shane-Ann Younts, and Ursula Meyer. All of whom are some of the bet vocal teachers and coaches in the United States.

Experience

Fedra works as a voice and dialects consultant in diverse settings from commercial to film sets, and also as a private coach in both New York and Los Angeles. She has also worked as an actor in theatre and film. She brings all this experiences, along with a long history of collaborating in diverse Spanish-language spaces, in order to create artistic training that is expansive and exploratory.

Philosophy

I believe that dialects are a way of categorizing people’s personal music into regional, cultural, socioeconomic, and political identities. The true goal of approaching a dialect is to acquire as many tools as possible. To be good, I believe it is very important to be able to listen, absorb and embody someone else’s energy, sound, melody, and rhythm in a way that is specific and authentic. As a teacher, I believe that we can reach this place through creating a space in which students feel brave enough to explore both themselves and others with honesty. The classroom is a lab in which the actor can fail and discover freely. Part of this discovery is integrating dialect work into a holistic approach to the actor’s work and the character’s world. Speech is intertwined with movement, and this is intertwined with text analysis and the actor’s imagination.

I also have a deep commitment to making dialect work a tool for artists of color, in order to expand truth in their work, rather than feeling constricted or struggling with avoiding the notion that they are reinforcing racial stereotypes.