About Diane Robinson
About Diane Robinson
Diane Robinson is a certified Fitzmaurice Voicework® teacher and a 34-year member of Actors Equity Association. Diane has an MFA in Acting from the University of California, Irvine. Diane has taught acting, voice, speech and movement, as well as playwriting and theater history, and served as an accent/text coach for many theater productions at universities around the country, including in Chicago at Roosevelt University, Columbia College Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of Illinois Chicago, and for the University of California, Irvine, San Francisco State University, the University of Texas at El Paso, California State University – Long Beach, and Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Since 1987, Diane has performed in theaters around the country including with Victory Gardens Theatre and ShawChicago, Chicago Dramatists, Madison Rep, Nebraska Rep, Delaware Theatre Company, Hugo House in Seattle, The Eureka Theatre, The Magic Theatre, the Marin Theatre Company, the Mark Taper Forum, Cornerstone Theater Company, South Coast Repertory Theatre, ASK Theatre Projects, California Shakespeare Festival, and the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, where she interned as a new Equity member after graduate school. Diane won multiple awards as a producer, director and actor with 20 world premieres for Theatre of NOTE in Hollywood, Los Angeles, in the 1990s. Diane has served as a reader for new play development programs for Steppenwolf Theatre, the Mark Taper Forum, and for ASK Theater Projects, and produced the New Jewish Playwrights playreading series for the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies.
Diane’s private vocal coaching work with her company, Chicago Voice Center, has centered on working with transgender and non-binary voices since 2016. In addition to working with private clients, in 2021 Diane led a series of 10 online intensive workshops on voice and gender to voice teachers, singing teachers, and speech language therapists from around the world, reaching 100 instructors and clinicians. Other recent voice and gender workshops include one for the MA Voice students at the Royal Central School of London, and another for the speech-language pathology department at Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago. Diane has presented on voice and gender at the Creative Bodies Creative Minds conference in Graz, Austria, at the Transgender Singing Conference at Earlham College, for the Voice and Speech Trainer’s Association (VASTA), and at One Voice Transgender Voices Festival in St. Paul. She is scheduled to present an online voice and gender workshop in late 2022 for Transfest Stockholm.
Diane serves on the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion committee of VASTA and is a 2022 focus group leader for VASTA’s mission and values project. Recent continuing professional training includes completing Northwestern University’s Transgender Voice Clinical Training Workshop, the Transgender Voice and Communication Training for Voice Clinicians (Hirsch, Helou and Block), and foundational courses with the World Professional Association of Transgender Health.