Mike Walsh

Mike Walsh is a voice, speech, and dialect coach for theater, film, and television. He began working with actors on speech and dialects as far back as 2009 and studied speech and dialect under Susan Cameron at Columbia, Linklater voice with Andrea Haring, and Alexander Technique with Karen Braga and Margi Douglas. He is highly proficient in the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is the foundation of how he teaches.

He has coached Hollywood actors including Cameron Monaghan of Gotham and Shameless, Brian Geraghty of 1923: A Yellowstone Origin Story and The Hurt Locker, Genesis Rodriguez of Big Hero 6, Arica Himmel of Mixed-ish, and Broadway’s Erica Spyres of Once and Carousel. He made his Off-Broadway creative team debut as speech and dialect coach on King of the Jews, directed by Alexandra Aron, coaching Polish, Latvian, German, and Hungarian. He served as dialect coach on Titanic for director Ted Sperling, covering RP, Transatlantic, Irish, Scottish, and Manchester. His other production credits include The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Ragtime, The Light in the Piazza, Little Women, Cabaret, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, She Stoops to Conquer, and Nine. His working range covers North American, British, Irish, European, Oceanic, and South African dialects, and he speaks Spanish, German, and some Japanese.

As an actor, Mike has appeared Off-Broadway at Classic Stage Company and SoHo Playhouse and regionally at Riverside Theatre, Ivoryton Playhouse, and Greenwood Lake Theater. His roles include Rapunzel’s Prince and Stepmother in Into the Woods, Younger Brother in Ragtime, Anatoly in Chess, Hal in Proof, and understudy assignments as Rodrigo in Othello and Dr. Pinch in The Comedy of Errors.

Mike is frequently sought out for his expertise on accent work in film and television. He has been profiled by Columbia Magazine on the craft of mastering an accent, and in July 2026 he was quoted in national entertainment press analyzing the accent choices in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, where he observed that Nolan was “attempting to go closer to that idea of what would have been colloquial for the time.” He has taught voice, speech, and dialect on the faculties of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, the Institute of American Musical Theatre, and The New York Conservatory for Dramatic Arts, and he is a staff instructor with AccentsOff. He has also taught Shakespeare text in New York City public and private schools, making it accessible to children and teenagers.

In Voice & Diction at The Conservatory at NYPAA, Mike trains the instrument and the articulation together. Students learn breath support and free, unforced sound through Linklater work, and then the precise mechanics of speech through the IPA, so they can hear exactly what their mouth is doing and change it on purpose rather than by imitation. The goal is an actor who is intelligible in the back row without pushing, who can meet the demands of heightened text and classical language, and who has the technical vocabulary to pick up a dialect quickly when a job requires it.