Michael Samuel Kaplan

Assistant Professor, Voice, Speech, and Dialects

As an actor, Michael’s west coast stage credits include Sight Unseen, The Unvarnished Truth, The Substance of Fire, Castaway, Dylan, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. His Chicago credits include Unfinished Business, The Radio Play, Pie: New Plays in Your Face, and Breaking the Code.

Michael’s Off-Broadway and regional credits include Driving Miss Daisy, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Night Alive, Red, Miss Julie, Intimate Apparel, Nice People Dancing to Good Country Music, The Government Inspector, Our Town, A Christmas Carol, It’s A Wonderful Life Radio Play, Those Learned Ladies; the New York City premiere of A Splintered Soul; First Maria’s Italian and American production of Hamlet at Teatro Circulo in New York City; Kansas Repertory Theatre’s 2016 summer rep of Harvey and Angel Street; as well as the American regional premieres of The History Boys, Oblomov, Ants, and God’s Ear. His television credits include Law & Order, Seinfeld, Saved by the Bell, and Unsolved Mysteries.

He received his formal training as an actor at University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Yale Drama School, American Conservatory Theatre and UCLA. He holds an MFA in Theatre Voice Pedagogy from the University of Alberta in Canada, and in 2018 was a recipient of a master’s scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada. Privately, he has studied with master instructors Milton Katselas, Jeffrey Tambor, Nina Foch, Nikolai Guzov and Patsy Rodenburg.

As an instructor, coach, and director, Michael has served as an Assistant Professor of Acting and Voice at Ithaca College, a Resident Artist at Cornell University, a guest instructor at the University of Alberta, and as an Artist-in-Residence for Voice at LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore. For ten summers he served, variously, as Director of Acting Programs and as Creative Director for the School of Creative and Performing Arts (SOCAPA) at their campuses in Manhattan and Vermont.

He is a proud member of Actors’ Equity Association, SAG-AFTRA, and the Voice and Speech Trainers’ Association, and is thrilled to be a new member of the faculty here in the Department of Dramatic Arts at UConn!

“Michael Kaplan Website”