Cynthia Santos DeCure

Cynthia Santos DeCure is a bilingual actor and voice and dialect coach. She is an Associate Professor Adjunct of Acting at the David Geffen School of Drama, at Yale University and certified as associate teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework® and certified in Knight-Thompson Speechwork. She has taught at CalArts, U.C. Santa Barbara, USC, CSU-Stanislaus, CSU-Los Angeles, and as well in Shanghai, Barcelona and Puerto Rico. A native Spanish-speaker, raised in Puerto Rico, her work and research centers on culturally inclusive pedagogies in actor training, specifically voice and speech, including Latina/o/x/e identity, linguistic identity, and accents of Spanish. Professor Santos DeCure’s work as a voice and dialect coach includes plays and television shows, including Yale Repertory Theatre productions of Wish You Were Here by Sanaz Toosi, Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles by Luis Alfaro, El Huracán by Charise Castro Smith, and Today Is My Birthday by Susan Soon He Stanton; Quixote Nuevo, Laughs In Spanish (Denver Center), Quixote Nuevo (RoundHouse), and upcoming (South Coast Rep), (Seattle Rep), (Portland Stage) tour; Cymbeline (NY Classical), Queen of Basel (Hartford TheatreWorks), Scenes with Cranes, Shelter (REDCAT/CalArts), In The Heights (Phoenix Theatre), (Chance Theater) I Come from Arizona (Children’s Theatre of Minneapolis) and the Netflix series, Orange is the New Black, The Affair, as well as individual actors on stage and screen. An actor member of SAG-AFTRA and Actor’s Equity, some of her credits include: The Mambo Kings, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Days of Our Lives, The Bold & The Beautiful, General Hospital, All My Children as well as numerous commercials; Stage: Long Road Today (South Coast Rep), The Tempest (Elm Shakespeare) & (Will Geer Theatricum, CA) A Christmas Carol, The Exonerated, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Long Beach Shakespeare). Professor Santos DeCure is also a playwright. Her one-act play, Miss Quince, was produced in the John Lion New Play Festival, and received readings at Urban Theater company in Chicago, Cara Mia in Dallas and Dramatic Question in NYC. Her bilingual co-adaptation with Tatiana Pandiani of Bodas de Sangre (Blood Wedding) was presented by DGSD (Yale Drama) in the fall of 2021. She is currently developing "Cindy's Boogaloo" a play with music from her late father, arranger-composer Ray Santos. She served as Artistic Associate and Director of Educational Development with the Long Beach Shakespeare Company (2009-11) where she created the curriculum for their Summer Drama Camp and adapted and directed Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Twelfth Night for the Long Beach Sea Festival. Professor Santos DeCure’s academic directing credits also include her bilingual adaptation of Lorca’s Yerma, Roosters by Milcha Sanchez-Scott and Silent Sky by Lauren Gunderson. An actor activist, Cynthia has served on the boards of the Screen Actors Guild (1996-2001, where she chaired the Latino committee and the National Women’s Committee the), Voice and Speech Trainer’s Association (also served as EDI chair and EDIA Director), and the steering committee of the Latinx Theatre Commons. She is a Yale Public Voices Fellow of the OpEd Project. She Her publications include, the award-winning, the co-edited Scenes for Latinx Actors (Smith and Kraus); book chapter- “La Voz de Shakespeare” (in book Shakespeare and Latinidad by Trevor Boffone Carla Della Gatta, Oxford Press), and co-editor of the forthcoming Latinx Actor Training, (Routledge). She has trained at New Actors Workshop NY, Cal Arts, and earned her BA in acting from the University of Southern California, and an MFA in acting from California State University, Los Angeles. For more info visit: www.cynthiadecure.com --- www.latinxactortraining.com