Take an Inside Voice lesson with The Pride
Since I began offering Inside Voice, my roster has always been full; there has always been a waiting list; and I am always in the sad position of turning away people who want to experience the ecstasy of their embodied voice.
Well, Inside Voice has just become a whole lot more abundant and accessible: I'm so thrilled to announce The Pride, a cohort of six independent voice teachers whose work centers around Inside Voice techniques. Each of these wonderhumans has trained with me for years and has completed the Inside Voice teacher training program. They each bring their own magic and their own passions to this work, and I am so excited to see how Inside Voice evolves in the coming years as their wisdoms transform these practices. Read how they describe themselves below and contact them directly to set up your first session. If you need help figuring out who might be best for you, feel free to email me for a little musical matchmaking...
Do you want to discover your Inside Voice with...
Well, Inside Voice has just become a whole lot more abundant and accessible: I'm so thrilled to announce The Pride, a cohort of six independent voice teachers whose work centers around Inside Voice techniques. Each of these wonderhumans has trained with me for years and has completed the Inside Voice teacher training program. They each bring their own magic and their own passions to this work, and I am so excited to see how Inside Voice evolves in the coming years as their wisdoms transform these practices. Read how they describe themselves below and contact them directly to set up your first session. If you need help figuring out who might be best for you, feel free to email me for a little musical matchmaking...
Do you want to discover your Inside Voice with...
- ...a Shinnecock woman and a Black American who uses song to move the legacies of this colonized system from our bodies, lowering the internal walls that our bodies unknowingly hold? Meet Andrina
- ...a queer witch who is committed to supporting you as you become the catalyst for your transformation and liberation? Meet Alison
- ...a singer and empath with 2 decades of voice training and experience who wants you to dive into your emotions and express the full range of them with your voice and song? Meet Kayla
- ...a big, goofy yogi who just wants to spread more light and love in the world and help you find more beauty and joy in your voice? Meet Nick
- ...a therapist-in-training and drummer who has extensive familiarity with various healing practices and a passion for all different kinds of music? Meet Tyler
- ...a death positive musician & activist with deep experience in the transformative natures of performance & ritual? Meet Felicity
Andrina Wekontash Smith (She/Her)
Face-to-face sessions available in NYC. Remote sessions also available. Andrina regularly teaches the BIPOC-only Sing a Secret Experience in NYC |
Four years of studying Musical Theatre at a prestigious theatre program is where I thought my song had died. As a person of color in a primarily white institution, I never received the support my blossoming sound required. After graduating, singing became the bane of my existence. It became relegated to karaoke songs that I had sung ad nauseum, stomping out any opportunity for my voice. Spontaneity required a trust in my sound that I had long ago abandoned.
Instead of singing, my post collegiate years focused on storytelling. I realized that the roles I wanted to explore were not available to me (this was a pre-Hamilton world), and so I set out to create them. As a Shinnecock native and black woman born and raised in the Hamptons, my twenties were spent exploring the complexity of that identity. I performed one woman shows where singing was an element, but never took center stage. Instead, I dove deeper into storytelling. Having spent countless hours of my youth surrounded by powwow camp fires, listening to the stories of my elders, I wanted the story of my people to be shared. My storytelling shifted from unpacking my identity to sharing my tribe's truth. And had I never met Jonathan Stancato, that story would have progressed without recognizing how much I truly missed singing. Jonathan was the first person that gave me permission to take up the full space my voice could occupy. Shedding the old ideas of voice, with him, I was able to remember the joy of singing. I was able to re-story the narrative so that singing was no longer laden with trauma. Exploring trauma, however, is a huge part of the work that I do- specifically the intersection of race and trauma. In our country, the impacts of racial trauma in our bodies are rarely explored. The effects those traumas have on our voice are explored even less. With this work, I want to offer a safe place for people whose voice has been marginalized in this oppressive, colonized system. I want to help you to reclaim the vocal inheritance left by your ancestors who preceded you, and find courage in your song once more- topped with a hearty dollop of joy. I have recently sold a show to ABC network with Kerry Washington’s production company. The work on page is enhanced by the work with Inside Voice, because storytelling takes many forms. But storytelling’s potential is fully unlocked when we realize how much control we have over our songs' narrative. This work helped me find that truth, and it would be my humblest honor to explore that truth with you as well. |
Al(ison) McLaughlin (She/They)
Face-to-face sessions available in NYC. Remote sessions also available Alison regularly teaches the Sing a Secret Experience in NYC |
My name is Alison. I also go by Al. I’m a queer artist, witch, and teacher, practicing living from the center of my favorite paradoxes and in a world of my own mythology. I have experience with performance, spiralic journeying, somatic and energetic therapies, herbal crafting, astrology, magic, dreams, and ritual.
Born and raised in Boston and its suburbs, I’ve made my home in Brooklyn and the Pioneer Valley in MA since. I love the work of relationships and creative family structures, and am fortunate to know long committed and collaborative partnership and a nest of intimacies that encourage the next right step for each & both. I know the need for space from family of origin for perspective, and I have experience repairing family of origin and ancestral fractures, too, a process which I am moving through presently. I’ve been working on a birthing project, reviewing all the records, belongings, places, and relationships of my life, and being with and healing through all that’s come up along the way. It’s my dream to create and share a show made from found text and artifacts, and to invite everyone I’ve ever known and the public to come witness me in it. Some days the project is about saying everything that I expect might have no one still in the audience by the time I'm done. And even on those days the project is about loving myself and everyone I've ever known for loving me into being, even when they failed to love me, and even when I failed to love them. I’ve been a singer all my life, but I didn’t feel like a singer until I found this voice work, which I’d been seeking all my life, and began practicing. This voice work helps me digest and claim my life, and untangle from what was stifling for me in my socialization and education, while keeping the best of my socialization and education, too. This voice work is part of my everyday care for myself and others. This voice work is making it possible for me to create and share my art. And this voice work is something that I am called to teach. I love how this voice work finds us as we are. And I love how it blends technique and imagination for rooted transformation and liberation. I love how it welcomes shame, fear, rage, and grief, and how it calls for embodiment, nourishment, curiosity, pleasure, courage, joy, love. How it calls on the whole of our being and becoming. I love working with seekers, unlearners, and rewilders. I also love finding the seeker, unlearner, and rewilder in everyone. I want you to know the powers of learning to belong, co-creating with something bigger than yourself, finding your place in the unfolding, and living the life that is yours with each & every breath, speech, song. With thanks and love to my voice teacher, Jonathan. |
Kayla Green (She/Her)
Face-to-face sessions available in NYC. Remote sessions also available Kayla regularly teaches the Sing a Secret Experience in NYC kaylagreenactor.com @kaynblue |
Hello! I’m Kayla, she/her, sober, artist, hiker, Brooklynite. I am a singer and actor with a love for musical theatre, country, gospel, and folk music. Raised in Michigan, I started singing early and quickly moved into the realm of musicals which fostered a love of performance and led me to acting. I received my BA in vocal music performance, I studied acting and musical theatre as well as opera and classical music, and am well versed in the Great American Songbook. In NYC I studied the Meisner technique in acting which brought me to the discovery of my very rich emotional life. A shocking discovery for a gal from the blue collar midwest of GM and Oldsmobile factories.
I enjoy live theatre, playing my baritone ukulele, Prospect Park, riding the peloton, and early bedtimes. When I came to this work I was on the heels of suffering what felt to be an unbearable loss in my personal life and my grief was all consuming to the point that I could not bear the thought of singing. If I sang, how could I possibly hold it all in? Keep myself together? Everything I had learned about singing my entire life had me severing emotion for the sake of a pure tone, so I would have to wait until I was “better” to do it properly again, right? This is where I learned that crying and singing, for me, was the secret sauce. I found my voice, a voice more “ME” than any voice I had used before. A voice full of emotion, sadness, power, joy, yearning. A voice that holds less judgement for it and others'. I am here for tears, as I like to say, or always down to cry about it. If you are feeling stifled in your voice for reasons that you don’t have answers to yet, if technique in fact has not set free, if you have been a victim of your own perfectionism, if you want to discover or rediscover your one true voice, I would be honored to be of service to you. |
Nick Ware (He/Him)
Face-to-face sessions available in Philadelphia Remote sessions also available Nick regularly the Sing a Secret Experience in Philadelphia |
I am a voice teacher, yoga instructor, and theater artist based in Philadelphia, PA. I am a 200-Hour Registered Yoga Teacher from The Yoga Factory in Plano, Texas, certified by the International Yoga Alliance. I am also a certified Breath Coach via YogaBody’s online studio.
I hold a B.A. in Theatre from Rowan University and have been acting professionally since 2016. In addition, I have extensive training in the Lecoq pedagogy, which focuses on the body and physical expression onstage. I am fascinated by mind-body practices and the power of breath. I have an ongoing personal practice in the Wim Hof Method and enjoy combining it with my yoga practice. My hobbies include listening to and singing jazz, podcasts, edible marijuana, Mongolian throat singing, and watching and playing disc golf (he once shot a -9 at Sedgley Woods). As a teenager and young adult, I did not give myself permission to sing, even when I was by myself. I want to help people first see and believe that their voice is beautiful and then help identify what is getting in the way of it being even more beautiful. I pride myself on seeing the potential in others and helping them realize it in themselves. |
Tyler Hathaway (He/Him)
Face-to-face sessions available in Philadelphia Remote sessions also available Tyler regularly teaches an online intro called Sing from Your Inside Voice @TylerDHathaway |
I am a singing teacher and musician based in Philadelphia, PA, though I also teach remotely on a regular basis. Alongside my vocation as a singing teacher, I am enrolled in a Master's program at Goddard College toward becoming a mental health counselor with a focus on expressive arts therapies. My teaching practice is informed by my acting training (Meisner technique), prior career behind the camera in the film industry, and my experience as a drummer.
From my own history overcoming health challenges of both mind and body, I have extensive experience with different types of healing practices, including TMS (Tension Myositis Syndrome) and other mind-body symptom treatments, trauma-focused therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, different forms of meditation, breath work, and reiki. I was shocked when I discovered the healing power of this Inside Voice technique, and how it can bring such levity and joy to anyone. I am fascinated by psychology, spirituality, music (of all sorts of genres, from indie rock to 90’s punk to jazz to experimental rap to Indian classical), music theory, and the expressive arts, including but not limited to illustration, painting, poetry, acting, and dance. While I am a music nerd myself, I am thrilled to work with anyone from someone who is not particularly interested in music to those who are enthusiastic about music of any type. I pride myself in being able to provide a radically safe space for others and support them in their vulnerability and journey into the — sometimes scary, sometimes exciting — unknown. I can’t wait to explore that with you, on a journey that is custom-fit to your own special individuality. |
Fee Doyle (She/They)
Face-to-face sessions available in NYC. Remote sessions also available felicitydoyle.com @feliciousdoyle https://feedoyle.bandcamp.com/ |
I am an introverted musician, actor & writer who originally hails from Southern California. I have performed in some capacity since I was a little girl, including playing Classical Flute, and then pursuing a B.F.A. in Theatre Arts from Boston University. In NYC I worked for many years with Dzieci Theatre, investigating forms of ritual & music in performance, with an ethic rooted in Humanistic Psychology, and an aim towards personal transformation. I am Death Positive, a philosophy that permeates my world view & daily life. I am excited for the opportunity to address death & grief through this vocal work, as a means to provide more ritual for the process we will all eventually face.
I love baking bread, watching British comedies, hiking, studying Folk Music from all over the world, and am fluent in French. Currently in my creative life I sing & play Indie Folk music under the name Fee Doyle, and am working towards building a band & recording my first full-length album. I am interested in holding space & supporting you on your journey inward to uncover your true voice, and your true self. I am interested in the voices of activists, allies, & artists of all mediums - to support their vision to reflect the changing world. We all have voices that matter, and those voices must be heard. I could not imagine walking my path without the openings and profound transformations that Jonathan’s work has created for me, both personally & creatively. I am able to embrace the gifts of my true vulnerability, joy, instinct, freedom & power in my voice, and I want to help clients do the same. |
[LEGAL: Though I can help you choose which teacher might be the best fit for your particular needs, I am not functioning as their representative or as a referral agency. Though the members of the Pride have trained with me and will receive ongoing support and professional development, and though many of them will be working out of My Room, they are not employees or contractors of Inside Voice/Amato LLC., nor do they carry any certification or diploma bestowed by Inside Voice/Amato LLC. Inside Voice is a collection of embodied voice techniques and philosophies, not a corporate entity, and each above teacher offers their own interpretation of these techniques and philosophies. Neither I nor Amato LLC shall be held liable for anything that transpires in your work or communication with them. If there is anything you'd like to discuss with them, please contact them directly.]