A Practical Handbook for the Actor

Melissa Bruder is a native New Yorker and graduate of NYU, where she studied with the Stella Adler Conservatory, David Mamet and William H. Macy. She is a proud founding ensemble member of the Atlantic Theatre Company/Atlantic Acting School, NYC. She lives in Sydney, Australia where she works as an acting, dialogue and dialect coach in the film & television industry, and teaches professional-level classes at Practical Aesthetics Australia, Atlantic’s annex “Down Under.”

Lee Michael Cohn holds a BFA from NYU Drama as a departmental scholar and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California. He’s a film producer and director who placed in the Top Ten out of over 2,000 shows at the Edinburgh Theatre Festival. A playwriting grant recipient from California State University, Northridge, Lee’s new book, Directing Actors: A Practical Aesthetics Approach, was recently published by Routledge Press. Lee has taught acting at numerous major universities.

Madeleine Olnek is a filmmaker and playwright who has had four films at Sundance, including the comedies Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same and The Foxy Merkins. Her Guggenheim-award-winning SXSW film Wild Nights With Emily starred Molly Shannon as the first-ever onscreen queer Emily Dickinson. Shannon also credits her as “the midwife” for her SNL Mary Katharine Gallagher character while Olnek directed her in an NYU comedy show using the techniques outlined in this very book.

Nathaniel “Ned” Pollack studied at the New York University Undergraduate Drama Department, taking classes with the Stella Adler Studio and Playwrights’ Horizons Theater School. He then studied with David Mamet and William H. Macy in their Practical Aesthetics Workshop. He has worked at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, the Atlantic Theater Company in Chicago, and Playwrights’ Horizons in New York. More recently, he has been teaching and working in Video and Multimedia in the Bay Area.

Robert Previto is a playwright and director whose work has been produced in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Graduating New York University’s Drama Department as an Honors Scholar and winning The Founders Day Award for Academic Excellence, he earned his Masters Degree in Dramatic Writing at NYU in 1987, graduating in Advanced Standing. Author of 25 plays and several novels, his play “The Weight of Time” won first place in the Northport One-Act Festival in 2012.

Scott Zigler has been directing since 1985 and teaching acting since 1987. He is a founding member of the Atlantic Theater Company/Atlantic Theater Acting School and currently serves as the Dean of the School of Drama at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.