About Us

Cynthia Santos DeCure is a bilingual actor and voice and dialect coach. She is an Associate Professor Adjunct of Acting at David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University and certified as associate teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework® and certified in Knight-Thompson Speechwork. She has taught at CalArts, U.C. Santa Barbara, USC, CSU-Stanislaus, CSU-Los Angeles, and as well in Shanghai, Barcelona and Puerto Rico. 

A native Spanish-speaker who grew up in Puerto Rico, her work and research centers on culturally inclusive pedagogies in actor training, specifically voice and speech, including Latina/o/x/e identity, linguistic identity, and accents of Spanish.

Professor Santos-DeCure’s work as a voice and dialect coach includes plays and television shows, including Yale Repertory Theatre productions of El Huracán and Today Is My Birthday, Denver Center’s Quixote Nuevo, Cymbeline at NY Classical, Scenes with Cranes at REDCAT/CalArts, In The Heights at Phoenix Theatre, I Come from Arizona at Children’s Theatre of Minneapolis and the Netflix series, Orange is the New Black, The Affair as well as individual actors on stage and screen. An actor member of SAG-AFTRA and Actor’s Equity, some of her credits include: The Mambo Kings, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Days of Our Lives, The Bold & The Beautiful, General Hospital, All My Children as well as numerous commercials; Stage: Long Road Today (South Coast Rep), The Tempest (Elm Shakespeare) & (Will Geer Theatricum, CA) A Christmas Carol, The Exonerated, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Long Beach Shakespeare). 

Professor Santos-DeCure is also a playwright. Her one-act play, Miss Quince, was produced in the John Lion New Play Festival, and received readings at Urban Theater company in Chicago, Cara Mia in Dallas and Dramatic Question in NYC. Her bilingual co-adaptation with Tatiana Pandiani of Bodas de Sangre (Blood Wedding) was presented by DGSD (Yale Drama) in the fall of 2021. 

She served as Artistic Associate and Director of Educational Development with the Long Beach Shakespeare Company (2009-11) where she created the curriculum for their Summer Drama Camp and adapted and directed Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Twelfth Night for the Long Beach Sea Festival. Professor Santos-DeCure’s academic directing credits also include her bilingual adaptation of Lorca’s Yerma, Roosters by Milcha Sanchez-Scott and Silent Sky by Lauren Gunderson. 

An actor activist, Cynthia has served on the boards of the Screen Actors Guild (1996-2001, where she chaired the Latino committee and the National Women’s Committee the), Voice and Speech Trainer’s Association (also served as EDI chair and EDIA Director), and the steering committee of the Latinx Theatre Commons. She is a Yale Public Voices Fellow of the OpEd Project. She Her publications include, the award-winning, the co-edited Scenes for Latinx Actors (Smith and Kraus); book chapter- “La Voz de Shakespeare” (in book Shakespeare and Latinidad by Trevor Boffone Carla Della Gatta, Oxford Press), and co-editor of the forthcoming Latinx Actor Training, (Routledge). 

She has trained at New Actors Workshop NY, Cal Arts, and earned her BA in acting from the University of Southern California, and an MFA in acting from California State University, Los Angeles. 

Professor Micha Espinosa, Arizona State University (ASU), School of Music, Dance, and Theatre, has used her personal history and extensive knowledge as a Chicana theatre artist and actor as a springboard to examine and contextualize the experience of Latinos/as/xs in theater and film. Her creative and academic writings linking actor training politics, pedagogy, identity development, and ethics have led to Professor Espinosa's appointments as affiliate faculty with the School of Transborder Studies and the Sydney Poitier New American Film School at ASU. Professor Espinosa is the award-winning editor for the book Monologues for Latino Actors: A Resource Guide to the Contemporary Latino/a Playwrights and co-editor for the award-winning Scenes for Latinx Actors, and published numerous book chapters, book reviews, and articles.

As a performer, her career has spanned 35 years, and she has worked in film, television, theatre, commercials, and print/commercial modeling. She has been privileged to work with award-winning film and theatre directors, including Oliver Stone, Peter Patzak, Tina landau, Les Waters, and Aaron Landsman, among others. A long-standing member of the Screen Actors Guild and a former local board member, Professor Espinosa is known as a national and international presence and a leading voice for social justice in the classroom. 

Over the last ten years, her work has been rooted in activism, female empowerment, climate activism, and border consciousness. Since 2016, she has created 18 site-specific performances. She is a  performer for Guillermo Gomez Pena’s international performance collective, La Pocha Nostra. As the inaugural Artistic Director for Fitzmaurice Institute and as a senior lead teacher, she teaches throughout the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa. She has given more than 100+ masterclasses in voice and liberation practices and trained over 300+ designated teachers of Fitzmaurice Voicework. Professor Espinosa has given over 50 conference presentations and has been a guest on various podcasts, including Folger Shakespeare, In a Manner of Speaking, and the Theatre of Others. 

As a voice and text coach, she has worked on 100 + productions. Highlights of recent years include Oregon Shakespeare Festival: Peter and the Starcatcher, The Copper Children, Hairspray, Mother Road, La Comedia of Errors; Arizona Theatre Company: How to Raise and American Son; Man of La Mancha; Dallas Theatre Center: Our Town /Nuestro Pueblo; Milwaukee Repertory: Four Hands-Two Pianos, West Side Story, In the Heights. She was a dramaturg for REDCAT/CalArts Scenes with Cranes and the director for Mojada at Southwest Shakespeare.

Professor Espinosa was awarded ASU’s CLFSA Sangre de Arte Award for her mentorship of Latinx students and is the recipient of the 2022 Victoria Foundation Award for Outstanding Literary/Arts. She was inducted National Theatre Conference and is on the advisory board for Southwest Shakespeare Company, the editorial board of the Voice and Speech Trainers Association, and the steering committe for the Latinx Theatre Commons.

Professor Espinosa earned a BA in acting from Stephens College and a MFA in acting from the University of California, San Diego.