������

Andrea Caban is an Associate Professor, Head of Voice & Speech, Co-Director, and designated Master Teacher of Knight-Thompson Speechwork™. An award-winning academic writer, playwright and solo performer, Caban is interested in the intersection of actor-training and arts-based research methods with patient-centered care. She holds a research appointment at the UCI School of Medicine for testing her method of voice and accent modification for people living with ALS.  

Caban is also known as a professional accent and dialect coach for film and theatre. Some of her notable coaching credits include several plays at the Tony Award-winning South Coast Repertory Theatre like Absurd Person Singular, Chinglish, Death of a Salesman, Madwomen in a Volvo and Peter and the Starcatcher. She is the accent expert on HowCast.com, demonstrating over 30 accents. She is currently collaborating with Francis Ford Coppola on his career opus film, Megalopolis.  

Professor Caban is the sole co-author in common for the two most recent Knight-Thompson Speechwork texts on speech and accent training. The first, Experiencing Speech: A Skills-based Panlingual Approach to Actor Training, was published in 2021 by Routledge Academic Publishing, and is being adopted by top drama schools internationally. Her second text, Experiencing Accents: A Knight-Thompson Speechwork Guide for Acting in Accent, was published in November of 2023. 

One of her most notable, original works on campus is The Dreamers: Aquí y Allá, a devised theatre piece in collaboration with the California-Mexico Studies Center. She traveled to Mexico with ������ theatre arts students to interview a group of DACA students who were given permission through advance parole to return to their homeland for the first time since immigrating to the United States. The play was acclaimed “Best Play” by OC Weekly.