Amy Mihyang Ginther (she/they)

Amy is currently is an assistant professor within the Department of Performance, Play & Design at UC Santa Cruz.  She was transnationally adopted from South Korea and currently lives as an uninvited guest on Aswaswas-speaking Uypi territory. Ginther's research focuses on the relationship between voice, identity, and power structures within actor training environments while incorporating and re-contextualizing interdisciplinary topics such as critical pedagogy, critical race theory, sociolinguistics, accents, adoption studies, postcolonial theory, Shakespeare, standard language ideology, EFL, speech, singing, poetry, and intercultural theatre. Their edited volume, Stages of Reckoning: Antiracist and decolonial actor training, is due 2022 with Routledge and she is currently working on a musical about contestants of color who were eliminated from The Bachelor/ette, titled No Danger of Winning. 

Ginther has coached productions at Aurora Theatre (Berkeley) and Jewel Theatre (Santa Cruz) and provided voice support for the National Youth Theatre’s performance at the Welcoming Ceremonies during the 2012 Olympics in London. In Seoul, she has collaborated with Probationary and Seoul Players, Seoul Shakespeare Company, Seoul City Improv, International Filmmakers of Korea as well as coaching corporate clients. Ginther has performed in New York, Seoul, London, and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. In 2012, she performed Memorial with Alice Oswald during the Brighton Festival. They are a Theatre Amoeba Teaching Artist and was featured in a related TEDx Cheongju talk. Ginther's solo show, Homeful (2017), was performed at the American Adoption Congress Conference as a keynote performance, as well as in Off-Broadway, San Francisco, and London. 

Ginther is a member of VASTA, ATHE, was a previous Associate Editor of the Voice and Speech Review, and a VASTA former International Committee Chair. She is a contributor for the adoptee online publication Transracial Eyes, was the GOA’L Spotlight Adoptee (May 2014), and has been featured on the cover of the New York Times Magazine (2015), and in Playbill (2018), and Forbes (2018).  She has an essay in Modern Loss: Candid Conversation About Grief. Beginners Welcome (Harper Wave, 2018), which has gone into its first reprint. Awards and honors include a VASTA Conference Grant for Interdisciplinary Engagement (2015), Hellman Grant (2017), Best of Fringe, SF Fringe Festival (2017), Best Storytelling Show, United Solo Festival, NYC (2018).

She is a Master Teacher of Acting and Singing with Archetypes, and is a certified teacher of Knight-Thompson Speechwork and Tectonic Theatre Company’s Moment Work devising method.