Mary Irwin Furey is an American teacher and coach of voice, speech and text, now based in London. She is presently serving as Programme Leader on Rose Bruford College’s MFA in Voice (with Linklater Teaching Designation). She has been a Visiting Lecturer at the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama, teaching on both the BA Acting (Collaborative & Devised Theatre) and the MA/MFA Voice Studies courses. Since returning to the UK in 2019, Mary has also taught at RADA, LAMDA and ALRA, and the Meisner Toneelacademie Netherlands.
She is Professor Emerita at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA) School of Drama, where she taught voice, Shakespeare, and speech (including accents and dialects) from 1995-2018. UNCSA is regularly ranked as one of the top five professional actor training programs in the US. Mary served as Head of Voice and Speech from 2001-2016, and as Assistant Dean from 2013-2016. Mary had the great privilege of co-teaching Shakespeare for a decade with the late UNCSA Drama Dean Emeritus Gerald Freedman (artistic director of the New York Shakespeare Festival during the 1960’s). Together, Gerald and Mary substantially revised and expanded the Shakespeare curriculum at UNCSA. Shakespeare productions Mary coached there include Pericles, Hamlet, Henry V, Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Romeo and Juliet, The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labors Lost, As You Like It (twice), and at least two Midsummer Night’s Dreams, one of which was performed collaboratively with the Winston-Salem Symphony playing the Mendelssohn score under Maestro Robert Moody. Another orchestral Shakespeare outing was Much Ado About Nothing, with the UNCSA orchestra playing the Korngold score under Maestro and former UNCSA Chancellor John Mauceri. Much Ado was televised on UNC-TV, and won an arts programming Regional Emmy Award. Mary was invited to teach a workshop at Shakespeare’s Globe in London during the summer 2000 season, through the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts funded program, Shakespeare Lives. She did voice, text, and/or accent coaching on close to 100 productions for UNCSA. Mary twice received Teaching Excellence Awards from UNCSA, in 1998 and again in 2015.
Mary has spoken at VASTA (Voice & Speech Trainers Association) conferences, the Linklater Symposium held at LAMDA in June 2025, and presented a workshop demonstration on innovative speech teaching methodologies at the Southeastern Theatre Conference in North Carolina.