Born and raised in France, my love of languages started very young, due to my multicultural family (French, Italian, Yugoslavian grandparents with aunts and cousins living in Africa). My mother instilled the love of traveling in me by taking my sister and I on numerous trips around the world, opening our eyes to art, theater, dance and different cultures. Also musically trained, I always loved the musicality of various accents and in school chose a path in literature and linguistics while learning the performing arts in my spare time (music and dance, classical ballet, jazz, tap, Indian dance and Eastern European and Russian folk dancing). As a child I completed two years of schooling in one and skipped a grade and personal circumstances and my hunger for adventure then led me to leaving home at 15 to move to England alone.
In the UK, I realized how inadequate my school English was in preparing me for regular communication, while attending the French Lycée Charles de Gaulle and getting my baccalaureate diploma in literature and languages. I elaborated my own techniques to improve and transform my own dialect and fluency and the key to my progress, in addition to a musical ear and a talent for imitating accents and replicating sounds, was asking people to correct me relentlessly instead of letting my errors go and making fun of me. I later completed a degree in English literature, translation and phonetics, and was awarded a certificate of proficiency from Cambridge. I received the highest grade awarded at that time in phonetics, 20/20 in oral expression, at the University of Aix en Provence.
Concurrently, I also trained at Mountview Theatre School, then took a postgraduate performing arts course at ALRA, the Academy of Live and Performing Arts. I performed in the UK on the stage in fringe theater and on TV, passing for a native speaker after having completely transformed my own accent. It wasn’t until I received a grant for an intensive workshop at Espace Acteurs in Paris that some people found out I was in fact French!
After graduating, I worked on TV and fringe theater, and co-wrote a play "Alice in Wasteland", an environmental play which I then performed with two other actresses around nursery schools in London, to acquire our Equity cards which then allowed me to work on TV and in fringe theater.
Looking for yet another adventure, I moved to the US just before the turn of the millenium, got representation with ICM and booked my first radio commercial for Pac Bell, which allowed me to join SAG-AFTRA and launched my Voice-Over career. My voice career has spanned decades in dubbing, ADR, looping, voice match, narration, commercials, animation and then VO directing.
Concurrently, I led a career as a linguistics expert of the highest level, specializing in French localization, subtitling, technical, legal, literary translations and interpretation for world leaders and business executives. I translated legal contracts for all the major movie studios in Los Angeles and adapted scripts for French festivals and markets in Deauville, Paris and Cannes.
I also worked as a freelance journalist, writing articles for various publications (LA Parent Magazine, Aller Simple, France Today, Chic, etc.) in addition to proofreading and editing novels and scripts for US authors and screenwriters. I even completed a brief stint as a presenter for a local weekly French TV program, where I led the entertainment segment, conducting interviews, covering events and reviewing theatrical releases, which ended after several months when I quit after the producter/director/editor fell asleep in the editing room and comically spliced together the wrong question and answer from an interview I had conducted with a French movie star!
Having built a solid reputation for my attention to detail and accuracy in the linguistic world while working as a VO talent in all sectors of the industry, I was asked to share my knowledge with actors and became a sought=after Dialect Coach for American actors looking to adopt foreign accents and for actors from around the world wishing to perfect their performances in English. I love working with actors and supporting their performance, from auditions to sets, stages or postproduction studios.
In the last few years, because of my experience over decades in the industry and having witnessed or experienced several incidents which I wasn't always sure how to address, I welcomed the addition of intimacy coordinators to sets and stage and decided to get trained and add intimacy coordination to my professional work. It's a natural progression which encompasses all aspects of coaching actors and helps them enhance their performance safely.
In my free time, I have too many hobbies to list (there are never enough hours in a day!) and I am passionate about causes that move me deeply like homelessness, the US prison system, animal rights or lack thereof, plant-based diets and the environment.