Alison Skilbeck

Alison Skilbeck is an actor, director, teacher, and trainer. She has an Hons degree in Spanish and French from Oxford University where she first began to act, and she started her professional career by presenting a Spanish language programme on BBC Television.

For over two decades she has combined a busy and varied career in theatre, on radio and on television with directing and teaching. She has worked with RADA since the early '90s where she directs the drama students on the degree course and on short courses, specialising in Shakespeare, and serves on the admissions panel. She was made an Hon GSM for her work with actors and singers at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and has directed extensively at many other London drama schools. She has performed and taught abroad at various American universities during Shakespeare tours for Actors From The London Stage, and at European universities while on theatre tours for the British Council. Her acting career has continued alongside all this work.

She has written her own one-woman show; Are There More of You?, which she has performed to great acclaim at the Edinburgh Festival and in London. Most recently, she was in Michael Frayn's "Balmoral" for the Peter Hall Company in Bath, and on television featured in an episode of Midsummer Murders for ITV; on radio she was in the classic serial "Ruth" by Mrs Gaskell.

She has worked for RADA Enterprises since it began in 2000, bringing her experience of acting, directing and training actors to the wider world. She is a senior trainer in the field of Personal Development & Communication working with people from many different walks of life: top civil servants, local government members and officers, social workers, business executives at all levels and members of leading professional bodies.

Skilbeck is a Trustee of Friends of Sunera Foundation which helps raise funds and awareness in the UK for Sunera Foundation in Sri Lanka, which runs drama and dance workshops for disabled people all over the island regardless of ethnicity.