Voice & Text Director, Smote This

Philip Thompson is a voice, accent and text director based in Southern California. He trained as an actor at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), earning his MFA under the tutelage of Dudley Knight, Robert Cohen, and Jerzy Grotowski. In the thirty years since, he has worked extensively as a voice, accent, and text director for numerous theatre companies across the U.S. Notably, he has returned frequently to South Coast Repertory (34 productions), Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park (18 productions), Utah Shakespeare Festival (130 productions) where he is the Head of Voice and Text. In 2001, he returned to teach at UCI where he continued his collaboration with Dudley Knight, co-founding Knight-Thompson Speechwork (KTS), a methodology of speech and accent teaching that is widely taught in the US, Australia, and the UK. Learn more at ktspeechwork.org. He is a Senior Teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework. He has served as President on the Voice and Speech Trainers Association (VASTA), and on the board of the University Regional Theatre Association (U/RTA).