About us

The mission of The Makings of the Actor project is to serve as a central resource for the development and dissemination of best practices for the advancement of actor training pedagogy worldwide. Its goal is to address the needs of present and future actors. In particular, The Makings of the Actor seeks to facilitate dialogue between international practitioners and researchers from diverse fields of performance practice and scholarship.

Through an ongoing series of events, conferences, workshops, performances, artistic activities, and on-line resources, the mission of The Makings of the Actor is to advance actor training pedagogy by fostering a dialogue between those drawn from traditional approaches to the work of the actor, trainers whose approaches are founded upon embodied practices, and experts in related fields, such as phenomenology and social neuroscience; critically, this dialogue is both international and cross-cultural.

The vision is to offer both a platform for re-evaluating training and performance techniques from around the world and the means to foster a dialogue about the skills and knowledge necessary to develop the contemporary actor;  it is a physical and ‘virtual’ meeting place, a multi-dimensional Practice Research Centre where teachers and researchers can teach and test their methodologies, practices and theories in order to develop and disseminate their work through open discussion and sharing.  The goal of this discourse is to create a widely accessible knowledge-base which advances acting pedagogy and consequently the actor’s craft at both the individual artistic level, and the level of the global theatre industry.

While the epicenter of The Makings of the Actor is in Athens, the fabric of the project is woven from individuals and institutions that reflect diverse perspectives, heritages, traditions and countries.

Our goal for the project is very clear: its trajectory is “towards developing contemporary acting techniques, practices and methodologies in the for 21st century acting, training and performance.”