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Andrea Caban

Associate Teaching Professor

Biography

Professor Andrea Caban (she/they) is a professional accent/dialect coach for film and theatre, and a public speaking coach. She collaborated with Francis Ford Coppola on his career opus film Megalopolis. Notable theatre credits include several seasons at the Tony Award-winning South Coast Repertory Theatre (Absurd Person Singular, Chinglish, Death of a Salesman, Madwomen in a Volvo & Peter and the Starcatcher), Appropriate at The Old Globe and Three Summers of Lincoln at La Jolla Playhouse. She is the accent expert on HowCast.com, demonstrating over 30 accents. Andrea is Co- Director and designated Master Teacher of Knight-Thompson Speechwork™ and is known internationally as a teacher of accent teachers. She has written two books on speech and accents based on that methodology: Experiencing Speech: A Skills-based, Panlingual Approach to Actor Training and Experiencing Accents: A Knight-Thompson Speechwork Guide for Acting in Accent. Also an award-winning solo artist, Andrea has performed her original works in Colombia, the UK, South Africa, Costa Rica, Spain, and across the US at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, New York Theatre Workshop, PS 122 and the Greenhouse Theatre among others. Her award-winning research on adapting actor voice and accent training for the care of people living with ALS to prolong their ability to speak without assistive devices is ongoing. She is a certified Fitzmaurice Voicework teacher and member of VASTA and the Dramatists Guild of America. She served as Head of Voice and Speech at CSULB for 11 years earning the rank of Full Professor and the 2024 Distinguished Faculty Scholarly and Creative Achievement Award. MFA, UC Irvine. andreacaban.com

About Speech Training

Speech training is an essential and deeply integrated layer of actor training and as such it is part of a complex and subtle developmental process. As with all parts of actor training the development of skills is not arrived at mechanically or by rote, but by cultivation and play, and by an incremental deepening of experience. A skills-based approach to speech and accent training invites the actor to explore all skills, not merely those that have been marked as socially preferred or euphonic (to someone in power). Limiting the opportunity to play with the full range of possible speech and accent sounds is impoverishing to the imagination. This work trains actors in the practice of expanding expressive territory through speech and accent.

Office

Galbraith Hall 224