Bio
Natsuko Ohama is an actor who trained under legendary voice teacher Kristin Linklater. She is a founding member and permanent faculty of Shakespeare and Company Lenox, Mass., a senior artist at Pan Asian Rep New York, and was the Director of Training at the National Arts Center of Canada. Ohama has taught at numerous institutions all over North America, including the NYU Experimental Theater Wing, Cal Arts, Columbia University, the Sundance Institute, New Actors Workshop, the Stratford Festival. Recently, Ohama taught in Shanghai China, Stromboli Italy, Istanbul, Turkey, Orkney Scotland, and at the Wooster Group Summer Institute in New York.
She also has an extensive workshop and private teaching practice in New York and Los Angeles. A Drama Desk nominated actress, she has portrayed roles ranging from Juliet to Lady Macbeth from Hamlet to Prospero (Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company) from the action film Speed to the cult series Forever Knight and American Playhouse on PBS. She has been seen on screen in Pirates of the Caribbean 2, and on stage at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Dogeaters as Imelda Marcos and favorite recent roles were as Polonius in the LAWSC production of Hamlet at the Odyssey Theatre and Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days at the Boston Court Theatre in Pasadena.
Ohama’s play Geisha of the Gilded Age-Miyuki Morgan, was staged at the Ventford Theater in Lenox, Mass. As a director, Ohama’s credits include the Press and FACE for Visions and Voices at USC, and Macbeth 3 at the HERE Theatre in New York starring Lisa Wolpe. Ohama is the recipient of the Playwright’s Arena Outstanding Contribution to Los Angeles Theatre Award and appears in the recent publication Voice and Speech Training in the New Millennium (Conversations with Master Teachers) by Nancy Saklad. She heads the voice progression for the MFA Acting Program at USC.
