Jennifer McCabe
E-mail: jennifer.mccabe@lehman.cuny.edu
Phone: 718-960-7838
Office: Speech and Theatre Building, Room 107
Office Hours: By appointment requested via email
Rank: Associate Professor
Degrees: B.S., SUNY Oneonta; M.F.A, The New School
Biography
Jennifer acting career spans 35 years. She has played over sixty stage roles, originating ten lead characters Off-Broadway at Cherry Lane, Atlantic, Barrow Group, Rattlestick Playwrights, Jane St., Soho Rep/Walkerspace, Epic Theatre. Her work has been met with stellar reviews from The New York Times, Variety, Broadway.com, TimeOut, NY Post and others. In Television, she has recurred and co-starred on NBC: Manifest, Blindspot, Law and Order: SVU, Law and Order: Organized Crime, CBS: FBI: Most Wanted; FX: The Americans.
Jennifer has been coaching and teaching actors for over 27 years and is an Associate Professor and Deputy Chair at the City University of New York at Lehman College. She is also an Adjunct Professor at NYU TischUndergraduate Film and Television and Drama and is a top director and teacher at Stonestreet Studios where she taught and directed Miles Teller in “The Musicians”, Rachel Brosnahan, Michael Gandolfini, Camila Mendez, Rachel Matthews and Jack Quaid, among others. She has been a Visiting Professor at SUNY Purchase, The New School for Drama (COPA) for their BFA and MFA in Acting, The Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute and a Guest Artist at SUNY New Paltz, Vassar.
As a second-generation Lee Strasberg acting teacher, she consistently instills essential tools and techniques to thousands of actors. Her unique approach and perspective as a practitioner to both foundational acting technique and specific on-camera training have afforded her the opportunity to distill with confidence and grace the necessary components to succeed as a working actor on stage and screen. Her Jump Then Justify® character development workshop has been a highly sought after approach to creating riveting characters for screen and her Top Ten Screen Acting Tools are used by thousands of actors.
As a filmmaker, Jennifer has written and directed many short films. Some include: “The Radish II”, “The Radish” (Berlin Independent Film Festival), “Tell It Like It Is: Stories from the Bronx”, “The Musicians” (with Miles Teller), “War and Peace”, “Since Feeling Is First”, “Hang Ten”, “Chemistry Project”, “Pleasure Princess”
Jennifer has also done extensive work as an artistic professional in Arts-in-Education. Having served for over fifteen years as a Drama Teaching Artist for Enact, Guggenheim Museum, Wingspan Arts, Actors Shakespeare Company and many others.
Her experience as a Lead Trainer with corporate education companies, Performance of a Lifetime and Performance Plus has given her the unique perspective of training business professionals in how to perform better ‘on the job’. These companies offer educational courses and workshops in communication and job performance for business professionals at Fortune 500 companies. Some clients: Price Waterhouse Coopers, Booz Allen, PNC Bank, Citibank, US Olympic Association, etc.
Jennifer is a proud member of:
- AEA (Actors Equity Association)
- SAG/AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild/American Federation of Television and Radio Artists)
- United Federation of Teachers
- New York Open Center
- NYS Teachers Association
- PSC CUNY
- ASTR (American Society for Theatre Research)
- ATHE (Association for Theatre in Higher Education)
