 MIRLA CRISTE earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Oberlin College, completing a Theatre major and Dance minor, and a Master of Fine Arts in Drama (Performance) from the University of California, Irvine. In her early years as a professional actor in New York City, she played lead and featured roles in a variety of classical and contemporary dramas, musicals, films and commercials before making her Broadway debut in the original cast of Miss Saigon. She has written, directed, choreographed, vocal-coached, produced, designed, composed for and performed in over two decades of professional film, television, concert dance, and the dramatic and musical stage.Along with a variety of acting techniques, Professor Criste's expertise includes a number of diverse dance and movement vocabularies as well as speaking and singing vocabularies. Her work centers on release and breath, as well as the symbiotic relationship between voice and movement training in theatre. For the Department of Theatre & Film Studies at the University of Georgia, she has taught the Appreciation of Dramatic Art, an offering in the university's core curriculum, along with courses in the voice, movement and acting curricula, based on the work of such pioneers as F.M. Alexander, Jacques Lecoq, Nancy Stark-Smith, Constantin Stanislavsky, Robert Cohen, and Kristin Linklater.Professor Criste's primary area of investigation involves the intersection between theatre and contact improvisation (CI), a movement discipline primarily identified with modern dance communities. Her work to develop Contact Theatre, a physical theatre modality that integrates CI within dramatic environments, has resulted in performances locally, nationally and internationally, most recently at the annual Performatica Festival in Cholula/Puebla, Mexico, where she performed an excerpt from her original Contact Theatre work, Water: Drought, partially supported by a project grant from the UGA's Ideas for Creative Exploration (ICE.In addition to making original works of physical theatre, Professor Criste has presented papers and workshops on a number of performance topics, directs both academically and professionally in a variety of performance genres, and continues to perform on a regular basis in the professional theatre. Some notable appearances in the Atlanta community include Theater Emory's Don Juan Comes Back From the War and Hamletmachine at 7 Stages Theatre.Professor Criste is named on two major grants from the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) and the Willson Center for Arts and Humanities (CHA), to bring dance theatre luminary Jacques Heim and his Diavolo Dance Theatre to UGA in FY 2010-2011, during which she will serve as the Rehearsal and Performance Director of the residency.Along with Actor Combatant status in the Society of American Fight Directors, Professor Criste holds memberships in Actors Equity Association, AFTRA, and the Screen Actors Guild. Her portfolio can be viewed at http://cristeworks.com.
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