Colleen Gleason is a Designated Linklater Teacher and a Certified Louis Colaianni Speech and Phonetics Practitioner who holds a designation in the Meisner Technique from the Meisner Institute. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in acting and directing from Marshall University and trained directly with master teachers including Kristin Linklater and Louis Colaianni.
For well over a decade she has taught voice, speech, dialects, and acting technique in private high schools, college BFA programs, acting conservatories, and professional theatres in New York City. Her teaching appointments include Pace University's Sands College of Performing Arts, where she is on the adjunct faculty in Acting for Film and Media, along with the NYU Tisch School of the Arts Experimental Theatre Wing BFA program, Syracuse University's Tepper Semester in the City, the Molloy College and CAP21 BFA program, Circle in the Square Theatre School, The New York Conservatory for Dramatic Arts, The Dalton School, and the Deena Levy Theatre Studio, where she taught the Linklater Progression.
She remains active in the training of teachers as well as actors. She is listed in the Linklater Center's directory of Designated Linklater Teachers and has served as an associate teacher on Linklater Voice Centre workshops alongside Louis Colaianni, including leading instruction on U.S. Appalachian accents.
As a dialect coach, Colleen's credits include Murder on the Nile, Lady Windermere's Fan, Much Ado About Nothing, Outward Bound, To Be or Not to Be, and the New York production of Debra Whitfield's FIRE!, her fifth collaboration with that director.
In Meisner Technique at The Conservatory at NYPAA, Colleen builds actors from the ground up on the foundation Sanford Meisner laid: repetition, genuine listening, and the discipline of putting attention on the other person rather than on yourself. Students work toward behavior that is truly spontaneous rather than performed, learning to respond honestly under pressure and to trust an impulse instead of planning one. Her rare combination of Meisner designation with Linklater voice and Colaianni speech training means students are not simply asked to be present, they are given the physical and vocal freedom to actually do it.
