Kristin Linklater is the artistic director of the Kristin Linklater Voice Centre, Orkney, Scotland. Recently retired from Columbia University School of the Arts, New York, she is Professor Emerita of Theatre Arts, Columbia University. She trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. Since 1963 she has taught voice, text and Shakespeare at New York University; Emerson College; the Stratford Festival, Ontario; the Guthrie Theatre; the Open Theater; the Negro Ensemble Company; for Broadway shows; and for Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts (1978–1990). She has been the artistic director of her own Company of Women, dedicated to strengthening women’s voices. As an actor she has played many of Shakespeare’s women and several of his men including the title role in King Lear. She has received major grants in support of her work from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Mellon Foundation and the NEA and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1981. Her book, Freeing the Natural Voice (first published in 1976) has sold over 100,000 copies. The revised and expanded edition was published in 2006 and has been translated into German, Italian, Russian, Korean, Polish and Spanish. Her second book Freeing Shakespeare’s Voice: An Actor’s Guide to Talking the Text was published in 1992. Teachers she has trained work in major actor-training programmes around the USA and abroad, and she herself teaches in Germany, Italy, Australia, Belgium, Finland, Sweden and the UK.

More information: www.linklatervoice.com