For Elisa Gonzales, training the voice means training the whole person. Their history, their language, their body, their story.

A Mexican-American theatre artist, educator, and playwright based in Amherst, MA, Elisa works at the intersection of voice, culture, and performance. She is an Assistant Professor of Voice and Acting at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a sought-after voice, text, and dialect coach whose work has been seen on Broadway and at institutions including the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, American Repertory Theatre, Portland Center Stage, and American Players Theatre, among many others.

Elisa is a certified Associate Teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework® and a certified teacher of Knight-Thompson Speechwork, with additional training in Lecoq, Rasaboxes, Viewpoints, Meisner, and voice over. She holds an MFA in Theatre Performance from Arizona State University and a BFA in Acting from Emerson College.

As a performer and solo artist, her work has appeared at the New York International Fringe Festival, the Nuyorican Poets Café, La Jolla Playhouse, San Diego Repertory Theatre, and Commonwealth Shakespeare Company. Her creative work centers on cultural identity, ancestry, and the reclamation of history through voice and story.

Elisa is the co-author of Spanish Accents and Dialects for Actors (Routledge, 2026), co-written with Adriano Cabral and Josh F.S. Moser — the first accent guidebook for Latine actors. She has also contributed chapters to Practitioner Research in Voice Studies (Routledge, 2025) and The Routledge Companion to Latine Theatre and Performance (2024), and has published peer-reviewed articles in the Voice and Speech Review. She regularly presents her scholarship at national and international conferences.

She is a proud member of VASTA, ATHE, the Dramatists Guild, and NALAC.