Andrea Caban

Andrea is the Associate Director and designated Master Teacher of Knight-Thompson Speechwork™. She is Head of Voice & Speech at Cal State University, Long Beach, training mid-career actors in a unique Performance Pedagogy MFA program and serving an exciting and diverse undergraduate BA program. Prior to that, Andrea was on the faculty at UC Irvine and CSU Fullerton, and has been an artist-in-residence at University of Cape Town, Penn State University, the MotherTongue Project- South Africa, and SWEAT- South Africa (Sex-workers education and Task Force), among others. She has performed and presented research at conferences and institutions in London, England, Bogota, Colombia, Cape Town, South Africa, Barcelona, Spain, San Ramon, Costa Rica and Istanbul, Turkey.

She is the dialect expert on HowCast.com, demonstrating over 35 different accents. Andrea is a voice/dialect coach for actors and other professionals, most recently working in that capacity for Tony-award winning South Coast Rep, Pacific Symphony and as a TED-talk coach. She is the only voice and speech educator to train other teachers in the Teacher Certification Programs for both Knight-Thompson Speechwork and Fitzmaurice Voicework.

Current research: Fitzmaurice Voicework and Knight-Thompson Speechwork in the care of people living with ALS to prolong the ability to speak without assistive devices, Arts Based Research theatrical performance forms such as auto-ethnography, community-based theatre, and investigative theatre, and projects in the Medical Humanities.

She earned her BA in Theatre from University of South Florida and her MFA in Acting from UC Irvine.

Professional affiliations include Dramatists Guild of America, Voice & Speech Teacher's Association, League of Professional Theatre Women (Dramatist–Full Member), Fitzmaurice Voicework® (Associate Teacher), Knight-Thompson Speechwork™ (Master Teacher), & Actors’ Equity Association.