Shawn C. Nelson

Shawn Clement Nelson is an American actor and acting coach.

Biography

Nelson was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He began teaching acting in New Orleans, Louisiana in his early twenties after attending Louisiana State University and graduating from the North Carolina School of the Arts in Drama. There, he was a classmate of Broadway and film stars Tom Hulce and Terrence Mann. He later moved to Houston, Texas where he taught at Patrick Swayze's mother Patty's studio. While in Houston, he found his first major film role in Joe Dante's Piranha. He later appeared in two other Dante pictures, Innerspace and .

Nelson moved to Los Angeles in 1979 and studied for the second time with film actor Donald Hotton, a student of New York coaching icon Mira Rostova. When Hotton moved back to New York, Nelson took up the teaching and coaching mantle.

Career

In her book 'Homesick', two time Emmy Award Winner Sela Ward praises Nelson as the coach with whom she worked on every episode of the NBC series Sisters, for which she won one of her Emmy Awards.

Nelson created and published the only CD audio course on Acting, 'The Impersonal Actor'. His five-year effort brought the publication to the libraries of several colleges and universities as recommended course material, including the University of Southern California.

A member of the Directors Guild of America, he has guest instructed in acting at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and Pasadena City College in California; and taught directors at Yavapai College Zaki Gordon Film Institute in Sedona, Arizona, and at Filmmakers Alliance in Los Angeles.

As a dialect coach he was mentioned in the February 2007 issue of Emmy Magazine for his work with actor Lennie James on the television series Jericho, and interviewed in Radio Times Online Magazine in London.

An expert in teaching American dialects to Europeans, Nelson also recently worked with German actress Diane Kruger on and with Irish actress Polly Walker on the CBS series Cane, and with Lena Heady on .