Theatre Practitioner, Director, Singing Teacher, & Acting Coach
Gillian Nogeire, Ph.D. is an experienced applied theatre practitioner, director, singing teacher, and acting coach. Coming to New York to be an actress, it didn’t take for her to discover her true love of directing, mentored by Peter Jensen, T. Schreiber Studio’s Artistic Director. As a director, she enjoyed developing new work, including musicals. She won the award for Best Director two years in a row at West Village Musical Theatre Festival for her work on Alone World and Man in the Iron Mask. Funded by the New York Restoration Project, she ran a bilingual summer Shakespeare festival that worked with underserved communities in local parks and gardens from the Bronx to Harlem. She then joined the Lincoln Center Director’s Lab. She remains especially passionate about directing Shakespeare’s plays in new and accessible ways.
Gillian maintains a keen interest in theatrical practice as embodied empathy and deep-rooted communication. After graduating with a Bachelor’s in Opera Performance, she lost her voice through illness and bad practices, reducing her range to just one-third of what it once was. Under the mentorship of Shirlee Emmons and using the Burton Coffin technique, she restored her vocal range. Currently, in addition to her role as Managing Director of T. Schreiber, she enjoys helping actors find their singing voices for that extra special skill on their resume and loves teaching students who think they can't sing.
Post-graduation, Gillian obtained her Master’s with research focusing on the study of Shakespeare in prisons to reduce recidivism. Her work at this time was mentored by Agnes Wilcox with Prison Performing Arts as well as Curt Tofteland with Shakespeare Behind Bars.
Applying her experience working with prisoners with cognitive disabilities, she began her Ph.D. intrigued by the possibility of using multimodal theatrical practice for individuals with aphasia, a neurological impairment impacting language. Drawing on new research in cognitive neuroscience, her dissertation, Using Theatrical Practices as a Modality Within an Intervention Plan for the Communication Impairment of Aphasia, explored the ways that theatrical practices can be used to enhance the communicative abilities of individuals with aphasia. She was mentored at this time by Dr. Oliver Gerland. Using the theory of Augusto Boal, Gillian piloted strategic cross-departmental research to document the value of the multimodal communication inherent in theatrical practice—bringing together the communication goals of speech-language pathology and the communication outcomes of theatrical practices.
As a result of this research, in 2019, with the support of their clinicians and CU Boulder theatre students, twelve actors with aphasia performed a ninety-minute devised production of The Wizard of Oz—the culmination of a semester’s rehearsals with CU Boulder’s Speech, Language, and Hearing Clinic (SLHC) chat group. Over the next 3 years, Gillian continued to develop the company, leading remote and in-person sessions. This work resulted in the group’s production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 2022, furthering Gillian’s research goals of disrupting the perceived superiority of verbal communication over nonverbal communication through the development of participant agency. Aside from the project’s theatrical and therapeutic value, the project had the distinction of having the actors’ rehearsal time covered by medical insurance.