Kelley Schoger is an Assistant Professor of Acting/Movement in the graduate and undergraduate programs in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Alabama (UA). Kelley is a movement specialist, actor, and nationally certified teacher of the Alexander Technique (AmSAT). Her teaching focuses on using various movement forms to help performers find greater availability, vulnerability, and expressive range. Professionally, Kelley has created several original works of physical theatre, including Her Destined Port (performed at New York City’s La Mama Experimental Theatre Club in 2015), and Beauty, Identity, Release (performed at the Edinburgh International Fringe Festival in 2019). She has collaborated on movement work including Mother Courage and Her Children (with Kathleen Turner at Arena Stage in DC), and with a British physical theatre company, Complicite. At UA, Kelley has served as a movement director and/or coach on numerous productions, directed plays including The Servant of Two Masters and Fried Green Tomatoes, and has acted in Ibsen’s Ghosts and Is My Verse Alive?, an original play about Emily Dickenson by UA colleague Steve Burch. 

While teaching at UA, she has created a three-year Alexander Technique sequence for graduate-level acting students and instructed undergraduates in acting and movement. Kelley is currently working with Jessica Wolf at Yale School of Drama on an Advanced Teacher Certification in Movement/Respiratory Re-education and is in the process of becoming certified in Intimacy Direction for the stage. At international and national conferences, she has presented research and offered numerous workshops in Alexander Technique & Acting, most recently at the Alexander Technique International Congress. She has also served as an instructor and/or guest teacher at Virginia Commonwealth University, Mary Baldwin College, Virginia Tech, STEP Birmingham, and UA’s Opera Program. Before coming to UA, Kelley acted professionally in New York City with companies such as MCC Theater, La MaMa E.T.C., Theatre for the New City, The Culture Project, and Aisling Arts, and also puppeteered for the Voice for Vision Puppet Festival and Mabou Mines (with Jane Catherine Shaw). Kelley holds an MFA in Theatre/Movement Pedagogy from Virginia Commonwealth University, a BA in Theatre from Virginia Tech, and has received additional acting training from Circle in the Square (NYC) and Gaiety School of Acting (Dublin, Ireland).