BRAD GREENQUIST

I have been working professionally as an actor for over 40 years in movies, on television and on the live stage. My first success came at the age of 19 when I won two film festival awards for a Super-8 film I wrote, produced, directed, edited and acted in (the awards were “Best Film in Competition” and “Best Acting”). Many years later – only a few years ago – I was associate producer on the short film “Like a Butterfly” that garnered 17 festival awards around the globe. In between I’ve acted in movies (the original “Pet Sematary,” “The Bedroom Window’, “Water for Elephants”, “Call of the Wild” etc), TV shows (most recently a recurring on “Why Women Kill”) and on the live stage (Broadway, Off-Broadway, LA intimate theatre, etc).

My own studying over the years has been wide and varied. Therefore, I bring many techniques into the klassroom; Meisner, Stanislavsky, Grotowski, breath-based techniques, vocal techniques. I received a BFA in acting from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1983. In New York I studied with the great actor Michael Moriarty for six years. In Los Angeles I studied with Hollywood’s best-kept secret, the brilliant Ian Tucker, for ten years. Along the way were other marvelous classes ad teachers, including a summer at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and short cinematography classes at UCLA.

Most importantly I bring over forty years of on-set observations: of myself, of other working actors, and of some of the greatest actors of our time; Jack Lemmon, George C. Scott, James Earl Jones, Isabella Rosselini, Will Smith, Kate Burton, Harrison Ford, Christoph Waltz, Billy Drago, etc..

I first started teaching in 1988 at Michael Moriarty’s Acting Studio in New York City. I have since taught on-going klasses or Master Klasses at USC, UCLA, Chapman University, The Governors’ School in Virginia, the Idaho Film and Television Institute, the Classical Theatre Lab in Los Angeles. I have taught my own klass (“Brad’s Class”) since it’s founding in 2005.

I am also a member of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and a member of the Pacific Resident Theatre Company, and I hold a brown belt in the martial art of Kempo.

One more thing: I am a working actor, and that is where I make my money. I don’t teach for the money. I teach because I enjoy it, and as a form of payback to all the wonderful mentors who have given so much to me along the way. Acting can only be passed down face to face, from individual to individual, generation to generation. I consider myself a link in this chain, a chain that reaches from right now back to my own teachers, and to their teachers, and to those teachers’ teachers, binding us all not only to D.W. Griffith and the first flickers of the cinema, but all the way back to the dawn of theater, to Thespis himself. This is a very cool thing… and this is why I teach.