Caren Adorni is an international acting teacher and coach whose work bridges professional actor training, theatre scholarship, and more than twenty-five years of teaching experience in the US and Europe.
She holds an M.A. in Theatre History and Criticism from UCLA, where her research focused on Eleonora Duse and modern European performance history. She also holds a B.A. in Philosophy with honors from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
She trained as an actor at The Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in Los Angeles with David Strasberg and Hedy Sontag. Caren founded The Actors Abbey in Los Angeles in 2000. She taught Acting for the Camera at Santa Barbara City College, and has taught Acting for the Camera, Acting in English for international actors and Scene Study in Rome at Studio4Cine, Teatro dei Contrari, and Laboratorio di Arti Sceniche.
Her international teaching has also included workshops and guest teaching in Norway and Greece, and most recently as a Visiting Professor for USAC in Verona teaching Shakespeare in Italy, through an experiential approach integrating text, performance, history and place.
Her work with actors is grounded in the principles of Stanislavski and informed by the major traditions of American actor training, as well as by theatre history, philosophy, and the individual creative process.
Caren lives and works between Italy and the US and offers private actor coaching as well as workshops and intensive training for acting studios, universities, conservatories and cultural institutions.
SAG-AFTRA
Teaching Philosophy
Actors are crafted storytellers.
Actors use their craft to express the complexities of what we call the human condition.
However, an actor needs much more than craft. An actor needs empathy.
I have found that it can be difficult to teach empathy.
But I have also found that through encouraging actors to look at others’ lives, their triumphs and their struggles, empathy can be cultivated.
Through this new way of seeing, I’ve witnessed actors move beyond egocentrism toward a deeper attention to others. It is an experiential shift not a theoretical one.
When this happens, an actor’s work is forever changed.
