American Accent
& Speech Coaching
I coach speakers of all kinds — actors, professionals, academics, anyone who works in English — in American English: accent, delivery, and preparation for the moments that matter, from auditions to presentations. In person in Prague or over video.
My specialty is helping Slavic-language speakers — Czech, Slovak, Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, etc. — sound at home in American English. I’m a native speaker, raised in Texas and later living in the Pacific Northwest, and I coach the full range of American sounds: the neutral “general American” of film and television, as well as Southern, Texan, New York, Midwestern, Californian, and other regional flavors on request.
I am listed under Dialogue Coaches and Script Development with the Czech Film Commission.
Why Slavic speakers?
The same few habits, every time
Slavic languages and American English disagree in predictable places, and those disagreements (not vocabulary, not grammar) are usually what makes spoken English sound foreign — on camera, on stage, or in a meeting. Czech and its neighbors give every syllable honest, equal weight; American English crushes most syllables and spends the time on a few.
Slavic languages pronounce final consonants cleanly but quietly devoice them — so bed becomes bet and love becomes loff — while American meaning often lives in exactly that final buzz. And American English is full of sounds and shortcuts that simply don’t exist in Slavic languages: the lazy vowel that fills most unstressed syllables, the soft t in water and city, the long vowels in go and day that end somewhere different than they start.
Because these patterns repeat from speaker to speaker, they can be diagnosed quickly and worked systematically — which is what a session does.
Sessions
We work from your real material — whatever you’re actually preparing to perform or present — and from recordings of real American speakers, never abstract drills alone. You read; I listen for what will give you the most return; then we work in short rounds — I say the line the way an American would, you take it, and we adjust one thing at a time until it holds. Every session ends with a full run of your piece, and you leave with a recording of the session, your pages marked up by hand, and a short daily practice plan, so the progress carries between sessions.
The first session is a diagnostic: you read a short passage plus your own material, and by the end you’ll know your two or three highest-value fixes by name — one of them already sounding better — and exactly what any further work would involve.
Rate: 1,500 Kč (€60) per hour, in person or online. No packages and no minimums — book a single session or as many as you find useful. Sessions with an audition attached can usually be arranged at short notice.
To book, email me with: (1) whatever material you’re working with — or nothing, and I’ll bring a piece for you; (2) a line or two on what you’re aiming for; (3) which American sound you want — neutral, or a specific region.
Who I Work With
Professionals & Academics
Talks, lectures, conference papers, interviews, and the everyday spoken English of international work. I’ve spent sixteen years editing English for Czech institutions and scholars; coaching spoken English is the same work, out loud.
Actors & productions
I prepare actors for English-language roles — auditions, self-tapes, accent work, and coaching under deadline; sessions with an audition attached can usually be arranged at short notice. Productions shooting in Prague with non-native English cast hire me for the same thing at scale: individual actor preparation before and during the shoot, along with script-level dialogue review — naturalness, character consistency, register.
I supported English dialogue on Sky City Haya, a Prague-based production. I’m listed with the Czech Film Commission, and production work is quoted per project.
Background
I am an American native English speaker — raised in Texas, later living in the Pacific Northwest — based in Prague since 2017. I hold an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana, and a BA in English with a screenwriting focus from the University of Texas at Austin. I have literary representation through Transatlantic Agency. My background is in how English works on the page and in performance — the gap between a line that reads well and a line that plays well is exactly the territory I work in.
Get in touch
If you’re working toward American English — for a role, a talk, or a career — or you’re a production shooting in Prague that needs dialogue support, get in touch with a brief description of what you’re working on.