MICHELE SHAY Michele Shay is an award-winning actress, director and producer, perhaps best known for her Tony Award-nominated performance as Louise in August Wilson’s Seven Guitars. She has also played Aunt Ester in Gem of the Ocean in productions directed by Kenny Leon, Phylicia Rashad and Ruben Santiago-Hudson; and Mame Wilks in the World premiere of Radio Golf directed by Timothy Douglas at Yale Rep. She has also played on Broadway in Samm-Art Williams Home with the Negro Ensemble Company and in NTOZAKE SHANGE’s for colored girls..., and A Photograph directed by Black Lightening’s Oz Scott and several Off Broadway , Regional theater, and television shows including Gem of the Ocean and Nora in An American Doll’s House at the Alliance Theater, Titania in Midsummer Night’s Dream opposite William Hurt, Virgilia in Coriolanus opposite Morgan Freeman, Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra, ,He Got Game with Denzel Washington, and Henrietta Morgan in NBC’s Another World. Most recently she acted in the world premiere of Nambi E. Kelley’s stage adaption of Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz directed by Kwame Kwe-Armah at Baltimore Center Stage and before that acted in German as Elfrieda in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins play War directed by Lileana Baine-Cruz opposite Charlayne Woodard at Lincoln Center’s LCT3 in New York. Directing credits include John Henry Redwood’s The Old Settler with Denise Burse and Pauletta Washington at the Billie Holiday Theatre in Brooklyn, seven plays in August Wilson’s The American Century Cycle including: King Hedley II, Fences, Gem of the Ocean, Seven Guitars, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, The Piano Lesson as well as Two Trains Running and King Hedley II for the NY Public Radio recordings of August Wilson’s American Century Cycle at The Greene Space produced by Indira Etwaroo. Other shows include: Fighting for the Title with Atlanta’s own Delores Burgess, trey anthony’s Da Kink in My Hair, Blues for an Alabama Sky, Blue Stockings by Jessica Swale and Gloria by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. In 1999 Ms Shay received aFox Foundation Grant to study the connection between Acting and the healing arts. A graduate of Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh Ms Shay e is a member of the Actors Center Workshop Company and the National Alliance of Acting Teachers both founded by J Michael Miller. She teaches aActing at NYU’s Tisch School of Drama’s New Studio headed by Kent Gash at NYU, at NYU Grad Acting , Columbia Grad Acting and she is a Founding Acting Instructor with the first Stella Adler/Billie Holiday Black Arts Institute Acting Intensive in New York this Summer. Ms Shay is honored to be working with True Color’s for the first time on Nina Simone Four Women especially because her cousin Weldon Irvine played with Simone and wrote the lyrics to Young ,Gifted and Black.
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She has been a member of the Guthrie Theater and the Negro Ensemble Theater Companies(NEC).
Ms Shay also has served on Theater Panels for the National Endowment for the Arts, New York and New Jersey State Arts Councils, the Princess Grace Foundation and the Board of directors for Theater Communications Group. She has taught acting at UNCSA in North Carolina, American Conservatory Theater (ACT) in San Francisco, Actors Theater of Louisville, Cal Arts, David Kagen’s on-camera Film Acting Studio in Los Angeles and currently at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and Columbia University. .
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Michele also began Coaching over ten years ago. Since then she has passionately applied the creative principles of performance employed by great actors to education, business, consulting, production and presentation to help people, especially executives and artists , presence themselves more powerfully and effectively in the public. Clients include Bridges in Organizations which she worked with for five years as a Leadership Presence Coach in the e award winning Leadership Alchemy Program at NASA’s Goddard Space Center,Boston’s Mind-Body Medical Institute, Theater Consultant at Essex County College, Newark,NJ; BOB, TLC, gospel singer and breast cancer survivor Delores Burgess, and Tony-nominated stage and film actress Sanaa Lathan.
In 1999 Ms Shay was honored with a Fox Foundation grant to study the connection between Acting and the healing arts. At that time she was introduced to the Energy System of Acting(ESA) created by Theater Director and energy healer Laura Fine. ESA exercises and knowledge of the human energy system and its impact on communication and performance Michele now teaches and incorporates in all of her work. She has presented ESA Exceptional Actor and Audition Workshops and Classes in collaboration with Laura in New York, Denver and Los Angeles. Michele is also a Mind-Body Counselor and Transpersonal Energy Healer with Lionheart Institute West. She offers one-on-one and group coaching combining with the restorative and regenerative benefits of healing protocols and wellness exercises that soften blocks and are designed to broaden range of expression and crystalize signature expressive style .
Michele is trained as a professional Ontological Coach by world renowned Master Coach Julio Olalla of the Newfield Network. She has also studied NLP with Fortune 500 Coach Linda Sommer, Mask work with Pierre LeFevre, Dreamwork for role development with Sandra Seacat and Gabrielle and Alvaro Lope-Waterman, Acting with William Esper, Harold Guskin, Stephen Book; voice with Kristin Linklater and Fran Bennett and currently Yat Malgram’s character psychology with Giles Foreman of London. She learned script analysis from screenwriting guru Syd Field in Los Angeles, and spent over eight years contributing to the development of new plays as part of the famous Eugene O’Neill Playwright’s Conference in Waterford, Connecticut. She holds a BFA in Acting from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh and an honorary MFA from ACT San Francisco. She recently was awarded the first Zelda Fichandler Scholarship by the International Michael Chekhov Association to study hiss Techniques,
