Cynthia is a bilingual actor and dialect coach with more than 25 years of professional experience. She is certified as an Associate Teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework® and as a teacher of Knight-Thompson Speechwork. A native Spanish-speaker who grew up in Puerto Rico, her work and research centers on culturally inclusive pedagogies in actor training, specifically voice and speech, including Latina/o/x/e identity, linguistic identity, and all accents of Spanish, and around the globe.
Cynthia served as the vocal and dialect coach at Yale Rep for the world-premiere of El Huracán, and coached at Yale Rep: Today Is Your Birthday, Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles and Wish You Were Here. She maintains an active professional career vocal and dialect coaching across the country, some of her coaching credits include: La Broa’ at Trinity Rep, Laughs in Spanish and Quixote Nuevo at Denver Center, Cymbeline at NY Classical, Quixote Nuevo at Round House Theatre, South Coast Rep, Seattle Rep and Portland Stage; The Hot Wing King at Hartford Stage and Baltimore Center Stage; Queen of Basil at Theatre Works Hartford; In the Heights at Marriott Theatre, Phoenix Theatre and Chance Theater; I Come From Arizona at Children’s Theatre of Minneapolis, Twelfth Night and The Tempest at Long Beach Shakespeare Company, Scenes with Cranes at REDCAT and bilingual Hamlet development at Folger Shakespeare. She also served as an on-set dialect coach for the Netflix series; Orange is the New Black. She specializes in coaching accents of Spanish in both Spanish and English.
A member of Actors’ Equity Association and the Screen Actors Guild/AFTRA, some of her acting credits include productions at Elm Shakespeare (Richard III, The Tempest); South Coast Repertory, Long Beach Shakespeare, Knightsbridge Theater, Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum, and Groupo de Teatro Sinergia/Nosotros. Her film and television work encompasses featured roles in projects such as The Mambo Kings, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, All My Children, The Bold and The Beautiful, Days of Our Lives, and General Hospital.
Cynthia is also a playwright. Her play, Miss Quince, was produced in conjunction with the John Lion New Play Festival in Los Angeles, and received staged readings at Cara Mia Theater in Dallas and Urban Theater Company in Chicago.
Cynthia is a Yale Whitney Humanities Center Fellow (2024-25) and Yale Public Voices Fellow of the OpEd Project (2021-22). She serves on the steering committee of the Latinx Theatre Commons, Fornés Institute, and is a member of Voice and Speech Trainers Association, where she served on their board and as director of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. She has previously on faculty at California State University, Stanislaus, UC Santa Barbara, University of Southern California, and California Institute of the Arts. Her publications include, co-editor Latinx Actor Training (Routledge) [featured in American Theatre Magazine, Latino International Book Award] and Scenes for Latinx Actors: Voices of the New American Theatre (Smith and Kraus); and the chapter “La Voz de Shakespeare” (in Shakespeare and Latinidad by Boffone/Della Gatta (Edinburgh University Press). She holds a BA in acting from the University of Southern California and an MFA from California State University, Los Angeles.