Emily Brown

Emily Jeanne Brown is an actor, singer, songwriter and teaching artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She has performed in theaters across the country and taught in arts programs on both coasts for over a decade. Theater credits include American Conservatory Theater, Guthrie Theatre, American Shakespeare Center, Texas Shakespeare Festival, Aurora Theatre Company and The Flea Theater. Emily received her B.A. in Theater at Smith College and her M.F.A. in acting at the American Conservatory Theater, studied Shakespeare at the British American Dramatic Academy and is a classically-trained legit soprano. 

Emily has taught Acting and Musical Theater at the award-winning Young Conservatory at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, Convent Stuart Hall's summer arts camp and with Wingspan Arts in New York City. In her private teaching practice, she works one-on-one teaching voice lessons and audition coaching with students ages 8-adult. Her vocal expertise spans from folk to jazz to musical theater and operetta. As an acting coach, Emily specializes in Shakespeare, scene analysis and physical comedy.

Emily believes that the centering principle of art-making is to tell a story that moves people. A well-told story can uplift, illuminate, transform, disturb, incite and connect us deeply to the shared experience of being human. Whether you are looking for a teacher who can help you shape your audition material, or hoping to bring more of yourself and YOUR SOUND to the foundational techniques of singing, Emily will empower your unique voice with confidence, ease and joyful expression!

Hello storytellers! I look forward to working with you.... but first, a little bit about how I approach teaching!

Through my actor-training, and years of hands-on artistic practice, I have discovered a set of tools that allow me to sustainably cultivate flow and authenticity in my own approach to acting and singing. My goal as a teacher is to share those tools, in order to empower students to connect with a process that serves their unique instrument. Our work together will enable students to bring the full range of who they are to their performances.

Using a foundation of breath and body exercises taken from the Alexander Technique and Middendorf Breath Work, I begin by helping students become grounded in the instrument of the body. From there, we will develop an in-depth warm up that explores resonance, breath control, dynamics, tone, placement and style. Finally, students will have the opportunity to work on material that speaks to them, whether they want to work with a singer-songwriter, pop, jazz, classical or music theater catalog (or all of the above!). Students will come away confident in their repertoire and, if necessary, with dynamic 32- and 16-bar cuts prepped for musical theater auditions. 

My approach to teaching songwriting is to let the student lead with a poetic or musical idea, and guide them forward using the same principles of breath, embodiment and storytelling that I use in my vocal and acting coaching method. Fundamentally, I ascribe to the notion that there is no "right" or "wrong" in songwriting, but rather there is only getting closer to or farther from the heart of what the storyteller is trying to say. Songwriting students will come away with exercises for generating lyrics, understanding the functions of rhyme, composing melody and developing song structure.