Eliza Jane Schneider is a multifaceted artist, encompassing the realms of acting, songwriting, oral history, dialect research, and playwriting. Her fascination with sound began at a tender age of seven, when she was recognized as a violin virtuoso and went on to study the Suzuki ear-training method at the Eastman School of Music, where she also honed her classical voice.
As a child, she was raised on a Chippewa reservation by a German drama teacher/playwright and a Jewish legal aid attorney. By the age of twelve, she had already earned her Equity card, playing English and American Southern roles in "A Christmas Carol" and "Inherit the Wind." Her extensive travels across America, recording dialects, culminated in her critically acclaimed one-woman show, "Freedom Of Speech," which premiered at the New York International Fringe Festival in 2003 and won the "Best Solo Show" award.
Eliza has voiced eight different female characters for Comedy Central's hit animated series "South Park" (1997) and created multiple dialect characters for MTV's "3-South" (2002),NBC's "King of the Hill" (1997),the Mel Gibson film "What Women Want" (2000),and Pixar's "Finding Nemo" (2003). She has also recurred on UPN's "Girlfriends" (2000) as a white girl fluent in "Ebonics" and on NBC's "Spy TV" (2001) as a Russian.
As a playwright, Eliza is a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) sponsored artist who has developed her plays, including "Sounds of Silence: A Documentary Puppet Musical Farce about the 2004 Election in Ohio," at the prestigious O'Neill Theater Center in New London, Connecticut. Her solo plays, "USA 911" and "Road Trip," have received critical acclaim and awards, including the Drama-Logue Critic's Award for Outstanding Performance.
Eliza is the founder of the "Eliza Doolittle Dialects" school, where she coaches actors for dialect roles and helps foreigners speak English with an American accent. She has organized master-classes with Robert Easton for top voice artists in Hollywood and has studied dialects and acting at Northwestern University and UCLA.
Eliza has digitally recorded over 1200 interviews with native speakers of variant forms of English throughout the world, traveling to Alaska, the UK, South Africa, and the West Indies to collect dialects. Her extensive collection of dialects has been used in various productions, including films, television shows, and theater performances.
