Diane Smith-Sadak
ASSOICIATE PROFESSOR (1999) dsadak@towson.edu (410)704-4970
Diane is an Associate Professor of
Acting and Directing. Professor Smith-Sadak is an AEA professional
actor
and
director. Currently she is listed in ë04/'05 and will be in the ë06/'07
editions of Marquis Who's Who In American Women and in the '06
edition of Who's Who in America. Smith-Sadak received her M.F.A.
in Directing from Florida State University and is a graduate of
Union College where she holds a BA in Economics and Political Science.
She began at Towson in Fall 1999 and was Head of the Performance
Program in the undergraduate division of the Department of Theatre
arts for 4 years before taking on her current position with the
MFA program. In 1998 she spent a year as Visiting Professor of
Acting and Voice at the Korean National University of Arts. She
has taught guest workshops at University of Rajasthan in India,
Dartington College in England, and at the National Institute of
Dramatic Arts in Sydney, Australia, and has studied extended vocal
techniques at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta , Canada
and most recently at the Roy Hart International Voice Institute
at Melarargues, France in July 2005. Prof. Smith-Sadak is currently
the Convener of the Theory and Practice of Performance Working
Group for the International Federation for Theatre Research. She
has published a chapter entitled, ìThe Soul Of The Story: Blending
Hart, Bogart and Suzuki ñ A Curricular Shift for the Globalized
American Actorî in a new book Ethnicity and Identity:
Global Performance . In January of 2003 she presented
her paper on the work of Roy Hart and its application to global
performance at the annual conference in Jaipur , India . In 2004
Prof. Sadak attended an IFTR Conference in St. Petersbug , Russia
to workshop new research on using Buddhist workbooks as a foundation
for advanced actor training. In the past three years, Ms. Smith-Sadak
has created the roles of Eva in Eve ën Eve ën Eve by
Daniel Nelson in 2003; Janis Joplin in a new work entitled Legends:
A Concert by Binnie Ritchie-Holum in 2003 and in
2004; and Zoë in A Cave In The Sky by
Juantia Rockwell in 2002. Smith-Sadak spent several years in California,
where she worked at numerous theatre companies as an actor and
director, as well as being a staff artist with the California Playwrights
Project. She was awarded two years of grant funding as an artist-in-residence
by the California Arts Council and was on the Executive Board of
the Actors Alliance of San Diego (AASD) for three years. During
her tenure with AASD, she sat on the steering committee to create
an annual actor-generated theatre festival for the San Diego arts
community, and was the festival's Director of Public Relations
for its first three years. Ms. Smith-Sadak wrote, directed and
performed in a one-woman show entitled "It's Not
Funny, I'm Only Laughing" which was produced
at the Sushi Performance Gallery in San Diego for the first Actors
Festival. In addition to her performance work and directing for
the stage, Ms. Smith-Sadak has acted in industrial videos, directed
for both the ITV network and KPBS in California and served as a
television panelist and voice-over actor in Seoul , Korea for Arirang
television. Ms. Smith-Sadak's recent research has been focused
on interweaving the training methodologies of the voice work of
Roy Hart, the training methods of Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki
and the American director and acting theorist Anne Bogart. She
has trained extensively with Ms. Bogart's SITI Company, and has
taught these movement techniques in professional workshops in California,
and as a visiting artist at various colleges and universities here
and abroad. She continues to be a voice student of Richard Armstrong,
one of the founding members of the Roy Hart Company. Her husband,
Adjunct Associate Professor Barry K. Smith, also teaches in the
Department of Theatre Arts at Towson and they have two children:
a son, Noel who is 9 1/2, and a daughter, Sage who is 7. They live
on a small farm in York , PA.
