There were no chairs in the room.
I spent twenty years speaking for a living: as a prosecutor, as counsel to a Fortune 50 company, as the ACLU's voice on air. The preparation was never the problem. The moment was.
Then I walked into an acting studio with mats where the chairs should have been, and began the training that changed what I understood about voice. I became an award-winning actor. Now I teach a whole-body path to voice and presence to women who carry consequential rooms.
Where it began: the one woman at the table, learning how laws are argued, drafted, and won.
Trying cases. I learned early what rooms do when the stakes rise, and what a voice has to carry when a verdict depends on it.
In-house counsel for Fortune 500 and Fortune 50 companies, then a law practice of my own, built for women. Two decades of advice delivered into rooms that did not always cooperate.
Media spokesperson for a national civil rights organization. Live questions, cameras, no script, and communities counting on the answer.
Legal guidance for survivors at domestic violence shelters. When two of my children were identified as neurodivergent, I co-founded nonprofit schools and programs for inclusive education, and joined a traveling puppet troupe that used storytelling to foster empathy and respect.
Award-winning work on stage and screen, and beneath it the voice and speech training taught in the world's most respected acting conservatories, including the Royal Conservatoire in Glasgow. I trained, and never stopped.
One cohort at a time, I teach women to develop what I had to find for myself. Mother of five, grandmother of twelve, I bring all of it into the room.
The approach
My approach draws on decades of study in the great voice traditions: Fitzmaurice, Lessac, Alexander, and Nadine George, curated into a method entirely my own. It is a whole-body path to voice and presence, not a list of delivery techniques to remember.
You do not sit and take notes. You breathe, sound, move and practice with other people, and you learn to notice what happens in your breath, body and attention when communication starts to matter. Session by session, more ways to breathe, sound, listen and respond become available to you.
None of it is about becoming an actor. The same capacities carry a negotiation, an interview, a boardroom challenge, a eulogy, a hard conversation at home. Wherever your life asks you to be heard, the work is the same, and more of you arrives.
