Marie Ramirez Downing

CONNECT:

Marie Ramirez Downing, Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts - Voice, Acting, Movement

M.F.A. Acting, The Theatre School Depaul University, B.A. Acting, CSU, Fresno

Marie specializes in Voice for the actor, public speaker and business professional. Marie teaches at Sonoma State University in the North Bay of California. She has also taught Theatre Performance of Idenity, Theatre Politics Performance and Power, World Theatre, Movement, and Acting and Social Wellness at Chico State. She has been guest Voice and Speech Faculty at Santa Clara University, U.C. Berkeley, and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Voice and Movement at Texas Tech University's School of Theatre and Dance.  

Marie is an elected board member of the Voice and Speech Trainers Association (VASTA) and has presented on panels and workshop presentations on Mexican American Heritage Identity and the Voice.  Her presentation "My Spanglish Home life, Finding My Voice" focused on the expectations put on Mexican American Actress' that are not fluent in Spanish and the challenges of "code switching" to fit in with both cultures. In her performance piece at the VASTA Minneapolis Conference, "Voices of Wisdom, Spanning Generations", she paralleled her voice mentor in storytelling their personal voice journeys highlighting the similarities and differences two different ethnicities, cultures and a 30 year age gap had on their Voice and Profession. In 2018, she presented with Linklater colleagues Liz Eckert and Joe Alberti on running and the Voice at the Seattle PAVA/VASTA “Soma and Science: Bridging the Gap in Interdisciplinary VoiceTraining" joint conference. It was titled, "“The Actor’s Voice and the Athlete: Bridging the Gap between the internal athleticism of the voice with the external athleticism of running.”

Marie has also presented Voice, Movement, and Speech workshops at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Conference  (ATHE) in both 2016 (Chicago), 2017 (Las Vegas) and has been the VASTA Focus Group ATHE Conference Planner for the 2018 Boston Conference. She will present on a panel titled, Representing the Unheard in Various States of Emergency: Making Room for Underrepresented Voices in Accent Study alongside her Linklater colleague Ben Corbett at ATHE in Austin, TX 2021.

Previously she presented voice worksops at the Southeastern Theatre Conference, The Western Academy of Management, and The KC American College Theatre Festival.

Bronze FOUNDING MEMBER
LOCATION
California
United States
YEAR OF DESIGNATION
2012