AACE UK Launch
Saturday, July 19, 2025 @Mountview
Keynote
Sally Ann Gritton
(MA, PGCLTHE, FHEA, FRSA)
Principal & Author (The Independent Actor)
(MA, PGCLTHE, FHEA, FRSA)
Principal & Author (The Independent Actor)
Sally Ann is Principal of Mountview, London, UK. She moved from her performance & directing career into the actor-training sector over 20 years ago to pursue her passion for supporting new and emerging artists. Specialising in developing forward-thinking, collaborative models of training for actors, her gradutes gain roles in theatre, film, television and voice-recorded media both nationally and internationaly, working widely across the creative industries and beyond.
Panel Discussion: Connection and Wellbeing
Claudette Williams
Course Leader
BA Actor Training
Royal Central School of Speech & Drama
Course Leader
BA Actor Training
Royal Central School of Speech & Drama
Claudette trained as an actor at The Guildhall School of Music and Drama and has worked extensively within theatre and TV. After obtaining her Postgraduate Diploma in Voice at Central, she joined their faculty in 1998 working on the BA (Hons) Acting course, as a specialist in Voice, Speech and Text. She also assisted the Head of Acting in the validation of the undergraduate three-course training model and established the Vocal pedagogy on the BA Acting and several MA courses, notably MA Classical Acting and MA Music Theatre, teaching on both courses.
Matt Wilde
Deputy Director of Actor Training
LAMDA
Deputy Director of Actor Training
LAMDA
Matt is the Course Leader of the BA (Hons) Professional Acting course at LAMDA and is an award winning Theatre & Film Director.
In his current position, he directs and teaches across a range of LAMDA’s acting programmes.
Matt has worked professionally as an Actor and Director nationally and internationally. His work has taken him to NYC: Broadway, UAE, Europe, Brazil and Mexico. He has directed at some of the UK’s leading theatres and is a former Associate Director of the National Theatre Studio and Out of Joint Theatre Company.
Scott Brooksbank
Freelance Acting Tutor
Director/Actor
Freelance Acting Tutor
Director/Actor
Scott trained at Guildhall School of Music & Drama. He teaches and directs at several London drama schools, is a Workshop Leader and Storyteller for the Education Department at Shakespeare's Globe, and an Associate Learning Practitioner for the RSC.
He is a leading member and Associate Director of experimental theatre company The Factory, with whom he has worked since its inception in 2007.
Recent acting credits include Othello for the RSC and As You Like It at Shakespeare's Globe.
Janette Smith
Head of Curriculum & Programming
Identity School of Acting
Head of Curriculum & Programming
Identity School of Acting
After initially training as a teacher at RCSSD, Janette launched her career as a freelance director. Winning the Regional Theatre’s Young Director’s Bursary at the Royal Court, she assisted James Macdonald on Sarah Kane’s Cleansed and 4.48 psychosis. As a freelancer she continued to direct and develop new work at Hampstead Theatre, Soho, Old Vic, Birmingham Rep, Young Vic, Warehouse theatre. She has directed shows at Mountview, RCSSD, Lamda and ArtsEd. She became Head of Acting at ArtsEd in 2017 after working there in senior roles for 6 years. Since 2021 she has been a Head of Curriculum at Identity.
Katie Hutchings
2nd Year Student
LAMDA
2nd Year Student
LAMDA
Katie grew up in Southeast London and is a second-year student at LAMDA & facilitator for the National Youth Theatre. As well as performing, Katie is really interested in the mental fitness aspect of actor training and where this can be improved in drama schools. She believes actors and artists alike are athletes and their minds must be trained as such to "consistently succeed & just keep going!” She is very excited to be on this panel and sharing her insights from her perspective.
Lecture/Workshop: Intimacy in Actor Training
Yarit Dor
Intimacy coordinator/movement director
Intimacy coordinator/movement director
Yarit is a fight director, movement director and IDC certified intimacy coordinator & intimacy director.
Since 2007, her multi-disciplinary work has informed her embodied practice and her passion for supporting productions. Yarit has been instrumental in shaping intimacy practice for stage and screen in the UK since 2018. In early 2019 she became the first Intimacy Director in London's West End and later that year she transferred her practice to screen as the Intimacy Coordinator on Adult Material (BBC) for which Hayley Squires earned an Emmy.