Paul Meier

Professor
Actor Training, London's Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama, BA in English and American Literature from the University of Kent at Canterbury Voice and Diction Specialist

Paul Meier is the resident voice specialist with the University Theatre and a professor in the Department of Theatre and Film where he is founder and director of the International Dialects of English Archive (IDEA) on the web at http://web.ku.edu/idea. As at several other American and British drama schools where he held academic appointments (The North Carolina School of the Arts, The Royal Academy Of Dramatic Arts, The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, The Webber-Douglas Drama School), Meier teaches voice, speech, dialect, and heightened text. His dialect class employs his textbook, Accents & Dialects for Stage and Screen, in use at many theatre departments across the country. His credentials include actor training at London's Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama, a degree in English and American Literature from the University of Kent at Canterbury, and a Certificate of Proficiency in Phonetics from the University of London (International Phonetics Association).

Meier's work as an actor on stage, in films and on television includes several years with the BBC Drama Repertory Company, appearing in over one hundred radio dramas. Films include Stolen Women, Cross of Fire, Ride With The Devil, and The Painting. Recent books-on-tape include Ayn Rand's Anthem and The Baghavad-Gita, while national commercials for which has provided voice-over include Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, Ford, and Sprint.

In his thirty-year career as a dialect coach, he has worked on several hundred stage productions. Recent Equity productions include a London revival of The Glass Menagerie starring Diana Hardcastle; and his dialect designs are used in productions world-wide. Meier has dialect-coached several feature films. Of special note are Ride With the Devil, directed by Ang Lee, starring Tobey Maguire, Skeet Ulrich, Jeffrey Wright, and Jewel; and Molokai: The Story of Father Damien, directed by Paul Cox, starring David Wenham, and featuring Peter O'Toole, Kris Kristofferson, Sam Neill, Derek Jacobi, and Tom Wilkinson.

At KU, as a director, his nearly twenty productions include nine Shakespeare plays, three musicals and an eclectic mix of modern and period drama, while he is credited with voice, speech, dialect, and text coaching more than fifty productions.

Meier is Associate Editor Emeritus for Pedagogy and Coaching for the Voice and Speech Review, a publication of the Voice and Speech Trainer's Association (VASTA), which has also published several of his articles. Altogether, he has published more than a dozen articles and chapters in books.

Department of Theatre
Murphy Hall
1530 Naismith Drive, Room 300
Lawrence, KS 66045-3102
1+ 785-864-2692
1+ 785-864-5251
pmeier@ku.edu
Websites: www.ku.edu/~idea; www.paulmeier.com; http://us.imdb.com/Name?Meier,+Paul