Sharon Marie Carnicke is internationally known for her groundbreaking research in Stanislavsky in Focus. She is currently Professor of Theatre and Russian at the University of Southern California (Los Angeles) and founder of the Stanislavsky Institute for the 21st Century.
Sharon earned her PhD in Russian from Columbia University, while maintaining an active career in theatre as actor, dancer, and director. She began her artistic work with an internship at the American Shakespeare Festival Theatre (Stratford, CT). She performed in New York and has directed in New York, Los Angeles, Moscow, and Oslo.
She has published widely on acting for stage, screen, and new media. In addition to Stanislavsky in Focus, her books include Anton Chekhov: 4 Plays and 3 Jokes, Checking out Chekhov, The Theatrical Instinct: The Work of Nikolai Evreinov, and Reframing Screen Performance (co-authored). Her articles and chapters number more than fifty. She has won many awards, including a citation for translation from the Kennedy Center (Washington, D.C.) and grants from prestigious organisations including the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Association for Theatre Studies, and the US National Science Foundation.
As a theatre artist, she is internationally known as a master teacher of Active Analysis, which was created by Stanislavsky and developed by Maria Knebel. Sharon has conducted intensives in the United States and globally at such institutions as the National Association of Acting Teachers, the National Academy of the Arts (Norway), MetodiFestival (Italy), NIDA (Australia), and The Moscow Art Theatre School. Her work with scientists has applied Active Analysis to the study of emotional expression through motion capture and interactive digital storytelling.
Sharon began her association with Digital Theatre+ with the filming of her 2016 lecture on Active Analysis for Twenty-First Century Actors.