Alison Matthews (she/her) – Member At Large
Alison is a voice specialist who teaches in the BFA Acting Program at the University of Alberta in Canada. She is also the Head Voice & Text Coach at Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival, where she has coached over forty productions since 2008.
A founding board member of the newly-formed Canadian National Voice Association, Alison currently serves as Member At Large. She was also a founding faculty member at Vancouver’s Arts Club Actor’s Intensive Training Program, and taught for five years with the Citadel Banff Professional Theatre Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta. As a speech trainer, she has worked with academics at the University of British Columbia’s Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, with immigrant and refugee women at the Vancouver Chapter of The Shoe Project, and with community leaders at Leadership Vancouver Island. For twenty years she adjudicated competitive speech festivals across Western Canada.
With three decades of wide-ranging professional acting experience, Alison has numerous film and television credits, including The X-Files, iZombie, Battlestar Galactica, and Disney's Snowdogs. She has stage credits with the former Vancouver Playhouse, Victoria’s Belfry Theatre, and The Firehall Arts Centre’s BC Buds: Spring Arts Festival, and has been in demand as a professional voice-over artist for over thirty years.
Alison holds a M.F.A. in Theatre from the University of British Columbia, and an Associate Diploma in Drama & Speech from Trinity College London.
Alison earned her Certificate in Accents & Phonetics in 2024.
Here's what she said about the course:
"Thank you so much for this wonderful course. I participated asynchronously because of the time difference (I’m in Western Canada) - deeply grateful for technology that allows this opportunity to learn from you. The weekly recordings and PDFs have been incredibly helpful, and your expertise, wisdom, insights and humour made the course a total pleasure."