Michelle Bellaver is a creative artist who works in film and theatre as an actor,
director, producer, and writer. She is an acting company member of The Hippodrome
State Theatre, an AEA professional theatre company in Florida where she produces the
annual New Works Festival. She is a Certified Trainer in Somatic Body Voice Kinesensics
with the Lessac Research and Training Institute and a Registered Somatic Movement
Educator with ISMETA.
Michelle's creative research on the theory and praxis of The Female Gaze as a somatic
practice in film and theatre performance and the development of a methodology for
her Somatic "The Heart Centered Actor" training is central to her work as a director,
as seen with her production of The Pliant Girls by Meghan Brown, a contemporary adaptation of Aeschylus's The Suppliants.
As a director, her inter-media work with film projections in live theatre performance
is a continuous experiment in The Female Gaze in narrative storytelling as seen in
some of her recent theater directing work, Dryland by Ruby Rae Spiegel and Marie Antoinette by David Adjmi, wherein Michelle explored her research on The Female Gaze in stage directing through the use of both
large-scale green-screen film projections she created and curated video projections
she designed, both used as elements of artifice to investigate women's interiority
on stage.
Her feature experimental film SAINT: 5 Etudes for Joan of Arc explores climate change and intuition through the investigation of the lives of five
women crossing over 500 years in history. Through the lens of The Female Gaze, Michelle
incorporated her research on Lessac Body Wisdom techniques in exploring a methodology
for "the feeling camera".
As an actor, some of her credits include work at La Mama NYC, Hippodrome State Theatre,
Word for Word/Z Space, Renegade Theatre Experiment, and Nuance Theatre Company. Some
of her film acting has streamed on Amazon Prime and Apple TV. She is a proud member
of SAG-AFTRA and AEA.
Her playwriting has been in residence, received readings, development workshops, and
works-in-progress showings at The Tank NYC, the Purple Rose Theatre Company, and Dixon
Place. Her short story Honeymoon Sweet can be found in The Windsor Review: International Journal. Since 2020, she has co-produced
the New Works Festival at The Hippodrome Theatre which focuses on the the development
workshop and public readings of new plays by established and emerging Florida playwrights.
