Merry Conway, Andrea Haring & Daniela Varon

Teaches at Linklater Center

Merry Conway has been teaching and thinking about movement for actors for over 30 years. She has taught Movement with Kristin Linklater at Shakespeare & Company and Stratford, taught with Trish Arnold at Carnegie-Mellon, taught at LAMDA and the Guildhall in London, as well as conducting numerous workshops at universities and independently. Merry has been a movement and acting coach for Anna Deavere Smith and LA Women’s Shakespeare Company and was the “Clownmaster” at Shakespeare & Company. Merry received an NEA directing fellowship to study fool and clown in Shakespeare. For the past 20 years she has been the Co-Artistic Director of Conway & Pratt Projects, making large-scale walk-through environments housed in abandoned spaces. The projects address themes of social import, and they create images of gesture and physical memory with performance, video and Super 8 film. They interweave these images with loaned objects and commentary from hundreds of people in local communities. Merry trained at Boston University and Common Stock Theatre in London, and did several courses with Jacques Lecoq. She apprenticed with Trish Arnold in the early 1970s and, happily, continues an active relationship with her still.

A director, actress and vocal coach, Andrea is also the Coordinator for Linklater Voice Teacher Training. She is currently on faculty at Columbia Graduate Theater Program, Circle in the Square Theatre School, and Fordham University. She has previously taught at Yale School of Drama, The New Actor’s Workshop, NYU Tisch Undergraduate Drama, and Dartmouth College. Andrea was a Founding Member of Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts. She regularly teaches at various theater schools and companies in London, Mexico, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Iceland. As vocal coach and a member of The LAByrinth Theater Company, Andrea has worked on The Little Flower of East Orange (Dir. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ellen Burstyn, Michael Shannon), Jack Goes Boating (Philip Seymour Hoffman, Daphne Rubin-Vega), The Last Days of Judas Iscariot (Sam Rockwell), Our Lady of 121st Street, and Jesus Hopped the A Train. Andrea coaches extensively On- and Off-Broadway – including The Motherf***er With the Hat (Tony Nominee 2011), A Behanding in Spokane, John Gabriel Borkman (BAM with Alan Rickman), Reasons To Be Pretty (Tony Nominee 2009), Suddenly Last Summer, and Bridge and Tunnel with Sarah Jones (Tony Winner, 2006), The Shadow Box (Mercedes Ruehl, Marlo Thomas), The Rose Tattoo (Mercedes Ruehl), Wrong Turn at Lungfish (Jamie Gertz, George C. Scott), On Borrowed Time (Dir. George C. Scott).    She has also worked with Bernadette Peters, Olympia Dukakis, Kim Cattrall, John Ortiz, Julia Stiles, Andre Gregory, Maura Tierney, Elizabeth Rodriguez, Tommy Sadoski, Piper Perabo, Sloane Shelton, Kristin Johnston, Rosemarie DeWitt, and Griffin Dunne.

Daniela Varon is a New York-based director and acting teacher and a longtime member of Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, MA. Her work, including Shakespeare, modern classics, contemporary and new plays, has been seen at some forty theater companies around the country.  Daniela has taught and guest-directed at Barnard, Bennington, Dartmouth, Emerson, and Smith Colleges and the University of Connecticut, as well as many conservatories and actor training programs, and she has been a Shakespeare specialist with Lincoln Center Theater’s Open Stages program. Daniela is a co-producer, director and moderator of the series Conversations with Shakespeare, which played three seasons at Symphony Space and is in development for public radio. She was Associate Director and co-founder, with Kristin Linklater, of The Company of Women. She is a Drama League Fellow, a New York Theater Workshop Usual Suspect, an alumna of the LCT Directors Lab, and has taught frequently for The Linklater Center for Voice and Language.