Summary
Mary Irwin Furey is an American teacher and coach of voice, speech and text, and an actor, now based in London. 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 dialects) from 1995-2018. Mary served as Head of Voice and Speech from 2001-2016, and as Assistant Dean from 2013-2016. Among the nearly 100 productions she worked on at UNCSA, an orchestral/theatrical Much Ado About Nothing won a Regional Arts Emmy Award. Mary twice received Teaching Excellence Awards from UNCSA.
Recent US teaching includes The Linklater Center for Voice & Language in NYC; Red Bull Theater’s Shakespeare and Jacobean Workshops; Cherokee Summer Storytelling Workshop in the Education Dept. of the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, Cherokee, NC.
Mary has extensive experience teaching, coaching and acting in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Her MA research, entitled “Alchemical Reactions: The fusion of Shakespeare’s text with voice and acting practices in contemporary actor training” was based on the work she did at UNCSA with the late Gerald Freedman, one of America’s foremost interpreters of Shakespeare. Mary was honoured to be asked by the late Kristin Linklater to develop and write curricula for this MFA. She has professional acting credits in theatre, television, radio, voice over and film.