Dwight Bacquie

Dwight Bacquie is an actor and voice and speech teacher who’s been teaching for more than 30 years. Jamaican by birth, he has lived in both Canada and the U.S. while working in the acting profession. His formal training was at Concordia University, Montreal, and the Yale School of Drama. While in Canada, he was artistic director of Black Theater Workshop, Inc., screenplay assessor for Ontario Film Development Corporation, and the recipient of numerous Canada Council Arts grants.

Bacquie’s extensive experience includes the Stratford Festival acting company, and he has performed in many Canadian and U.S. venues. His stage performances include Donny in American Buffalo at Portland Stage, Antonio in The Tempest at A Noise Within, Hassan in The Phantom of the Opera (the play) at Theatre Outremont, Isaac in A Change of View at the Harold Clurman Theater, Warren in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at Leah Posluns Theatre, Stanley in Playboy of the West Indies at Centaur Theater, Marcus in Titus Andronicus at Theater WUM, Fabian in Twelfth Night at the Stratford Festival, Snout in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Shakespeare Santa Cruz, creating the role of Simon in Sherry Coman’s SAY ZEBRA at Theatre Passe Muraille, and Othello at A Noise Within. He has also created more than 30 roles on television shows such as The Return of Elliot Ness, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Top Cops, The Practice, Jag, Charmed, The Division, Underground to Freedom, Street Legal, Drop Dead Gorgeous, Passions, The Sound and the Silence, and Family Pictures. Most recently, Bacquie appeared in the shorts Fuckin White Boy and Sky, which was honored with a top award at L.A.’s MethodFest Short Film festival.

In 1991, Bacquie did speech teacher training with Deborah Hecht at NYU-Tisch and Juilliard. Other postgraduate training in voice and speech includes workshops with Richard Neoczym (Grotowski-influenced voice performance), Patsy Rodenburg, in breathing (VASTA Conference, 2002), Phonetic Pillows (with Louis Colaianni), and KT Speech (“Which American Accent?”). He has also taught voice and speech at First Act Drama School (Montreal), voice at Fresh Elements School (Toronto), voice at California State Summer School for the Arts, accents and dialects at Stella Adler Academy (Los Angeles), voice and dialects for Actors’ Comedy Studio, and American speech at Edgemar Center for the Arts. He was head of voice and speech at New School of Drama (Toronto) and he has worked as a production coach and private voice and speech coach. His private students have included Samantha Mathis, Noah Silver, Megan Boone, and Patrick Dempsey. His most recent production coaching credit was as voice and dialects coach for the world premiere of Donnetta Lavinia Grays’ Last Night and the Night Before at Denver Center for the Performing Arts. Recently, Bacquie has begun voice acting and, in 2015, performed multiple roles in the audio book of the American Book Award-winning novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, an account of the assassination attempts on the life of reggae superstar Bob Marley.

Prior to Juilliard, Bacquie was the senior speech and voice instructor at CalArts/California Institute of the Arts, where he taught for almost two decades. While at CalArts, he created and ran a speech teacher-training track and led the speech program for his last six years there.