Professor Connie de Veer believes actors are noble, brave, and generous servants contributing to the well-being of the planet. She is committed to calling those qualities forth in her students, empowering them with a sense of agency in and responsibility to the larger community. It is that passion that drives her desire to integrate civic engagement into the curriculum at ISU. Theatre faculty cannot ensure their students steady employment professionally acting in the theatre; but it is Connie's mission to create opportunities upon graduation for actors to offer the skills they excel in: communication, collaboration, creativity, and community (the 4 C's) in non-Theatre based not-for-profit and/or for profit venues. It sure beats waiting tables. She is currently co-authoring a book, THE CARE AND FEEDING OF THE ACTOR'S SOUL, intended to support actors in the pursuit of their careers. She is the lead teacher of Voice, Speech, and Text in the Acting area; serves as Voice/Text/Dialect director for productions in the School of Theatre and Dance; and is an AmSAT certified teacher of the Alexander Technique. Her directing credits include a staged reading of Oneida: Servants of Motion for Peculiar Works Project, New York City (2007 Obie award winning company); From Door to Door at Circle Theatre, which won the Dallas/Fort Worth Critics’ Choice Awards for “Best Ensemble” and “Top Ten in the Metroplex for 2007;” Cosi Fan Tutte, The Pirates of Penzance, The Rover, Company and Riders to the Sea at Illinois State, The Burial at Thebes and Private Lives at Texas Christian University. As a 1992 recipient of the College of Fine Arts Faculty Initiative grant, she studied voice and text with Jane Boston and David Carey from the Central School of Speech and Drama. She studied the Linklater voice technique with Diane Timmerman at Indiana Repertory Theatre, and the Fitzmaurice Voicework® with Catherine Fitzmaurice. She is published in the 2009 edition of The Voice and Speech Review. She served as the Voice and Text coach for the 2010 season of the Illinois Shakespeare Festival, and has served as staff movement coach and choreographer for several seasons, on such productions as The Taming of the Shrew, The Triumph of Love, Romeo and Juliet, Pericles, The Comedy of Errors, the world premiere of The Falcon’s Pitch, and many others. She is a member of Actor’s Equity Association and her representative acting credits include Other Desert Cities, The Trip to Bountiful, Greetings, How I Got That Story, and Berlin to Broadway at Heartland Theatre Company; Chicago and Hansel and Grethel at Theatre Three; Fiddler on the Roof at Casa Manana, Kismet at Darien Dinner Theatre; The King and I at the Westchester Broadway Theater; and numerous roles as a company member with both the Light Opera of Manhattan and the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players. She has also taught Acting and Voice at Texas Christian University, The University of Iowa, and the University of Texas at Austin.