Sharon Marie Carnicke is professor of theatre and Slavic languages and literatures, and a founding fellow of University of Southern California’s Center for Excellence in Teaching. Fluent in Russian, she is the internationally-acclaimed author of Stanislavsky in Focus (now in its second edition), which lays bare the significant ways in which the American Method and the Stanislavsky System of actor training differ from each other. Reviews call her book essential reading for actors, directors and theatre scholars alike.

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She publishes widely in the fields of acting on stage and film, Russian theatre, dance, and performance in the town festivals of Puerto Rico. Among her other publications are The Theatrical Instinct (about the avant-garde director Nikolai Evreinov), Reframing Screen Performance (with Cynthia Baron), her nationally-produced translations of Chekhov’s plays in 4 Plays and 3 Jokes (including the Kennedy Center award-winning translation of The Seagull), and Checking out Chekhov.

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Her articles on film take readers beyond star studies to the actual work of actors, such as Jack Nicholson, John Wayne, Andy Serkis as Gollum and Elizabeth Taylor. Carnicke has worked professionally as an actor, director, dancer and master teacher of Stanislavsky’s Active Analysis. She regularly collaborates with the National Institute for Dramatic Arts (Australia) and the National Academy of Arts (Norway). Her speaking and teaching engagements have included: the Moscow Art Theatre (Russia), the Sorbonne and CNRS in Paris, the Institute for Puerto Rican Culture in San Juan, the University of Helsinki (Finland) and the Institute for Theatre Research (Tampere, Finland). Her mission is to bring Stanislavsky’s Active Analysis to the 21st century professional actor. To this end, she has already adapted it for Cinematic Performance Capture Technology through a joint project with USC’s engineering school and funded by the National Science Foundation.