Featuring: Miguel Fana (MFA Acting Graduate Student)

What are your favorite things about going to school in Knoxville? Restaurants? Parks?
First and foremost, the Acting program at University of Tennessee Knoxville is a hidden gem of a program. The classes are focused on the Craft of Acting and building an unshakable skill set that will serve in your acting career, both on stage and on film. In addition to voice training that places an emphasis on Linklater’s work and the International Phonetic Alphabet, we are given private Voice lessons in singing (and for me, rapping) once a week, each and every semester. There is also an emphasis on working with Shakespeare’s text and learning how to properly analyze and go about the performance of Shakespeare.

The college life here is great as well. The football games, as you can see in the picture, are absolutely HUGE! It’s a nice experience and the college offers tons of opportunities to try new experiences and learn from professionals in other parts of the school. We also take a trip to London in our second year to work with Barbara Houseman (Jude Law and Daniel Radcliffe’s voice coach); she also flies in and does workshops with us periodically to check on our progress and share her advice.

What is your favorite class at UTK? Why?
My favorite class at UTK’s Acting Program is Movement class, with Alexander technique training coming in a close second. The movement class is based on Suzuki training the first year, Corporeal Mime the second year, and Stage Combat the third year. Professor John Sipes leads this class and he studied directly under Suzuki-san in Japan for two years, as well as Corporeal Mime in Paris. He is also one of two Alexander Technique experts that we have in the program. We have two individual Alexander Technique sessions with two different professors every week as well (The other professor is Jed Diamond, but I will get to him later).

What made you want to attend UTK’s MFA Program?
What made me want to go to UTK was actually really simple. I earned a fair amount of interviews at The URTAs and Jed Diamond was the ONLY one who asked me how I was doing in a genuine way. He didn’t try to sell me the school, he just talked to me as a person worthy of respect and just listened to what was on my mind. They also flew me out to the program to check out their Production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (which was just spectacular) and sit-in on their Acting classes. That was what convinced me that I needed to be in this program.

Lastly, I liked that the program is building itself up, each and every year. We have an alumni who starred in The King and I on Broadway as “The King”; he is also a recurring character on How to Get Away With Murder starring Viola Davis. His name is Conrad Ricamora and he came back to visit us last fall and sit-in on our Acting class. It was great to get to know him and pick his brain about how he managed to become so successful after graduating. It was no surprise that, at his core, is an INSANE work ethic and I adopted that mentality immediately and I take it with me everywhere I go. I like that this program is a diamond in the rough, our theatre serves ALL of east Tennessee (we have over 2500 subscribers), and teaching is not a requirement (they really want us to go out and carve out a performing career, though teaching is offered to those interested).