Tom Bentley-Fisher trained and worked as an actor before beginning to teach and direct. He has acted in the West End, for B.B.C., on film and television, and in regional theatres across Canada.  Major influences in his approach to the work include Rudolph Laban, Yat Malmgren, Sanford Meisner and Peter Brook, as well as his evolutionary and revolutionary experiences throughout his career as an artistic director.
  
Tom began teaching at an early age when he worked for six years in the drama department at the University of Waterloo running the professional training program for actors and directors. Since, he has taught extensively in theatre schools and drama departments across Canada, including four years at the University of Saskatchewan.
  
Throughout his career as an artistic director Tom has been strongly committed to the training of the actor. In private and group classes, as well as in the rehearsal hall, he has gained a reputation as someone who challenges actors toward the most truthful and transformative work possible. As he encourages the artist to evolve so has his approach to the teaching. From 2002-2009 Tom ran an acting studio in San Francisco, where the technique he developed evolved into a comprehensive approach to creating character that is now being recorded into a book. 
  
Presently Tom is working more internationally and conducts master classes in Canada, Spain and the U.S. He works with actors, directors, dancers and writers. During the past two years he has taught a series of master classes to professional actors in Barcelona at Q-ars Teatre and the renowned Sala Beckett International Theatre Institute. He continues to challenge himself with the unfamiliar in the same way as he challenges his students.

Being an actor is a great privilege, and it is Tom Bentley-Fisher’s firm belief that actors must be the healthiest people in our society. 

Tom challenges his actors to bring every aspect of them selves to the work, employing not only what they know, but to discover and develop what they don’t know, to live within the chaos that can drive our subconscious to our conscious, and to welcome the hidden tensions between our inner and our outer realities. When this happens the actor is like a child, the impulse and action being one, and no longer are we under the influence of self-censorship or hiding behind our masks. 

Tom has been referred to as a “major bullshit detector” and works to create performances that are both truthful and daring. But as well as acting being about living truthfully in imaginary circumstances, Tom also believes that great acting is about transformation. And it is in bringing these two ideals together that Tom has dedicated his approach to the work. Like playing a piano he wants his actors to use every note and chord available in their being, not just the notes they learned early on and know will continue to serve them admirably. 

During the past thirty years, since his initial training with Yat Malmgren, founder of Drama Centre, London; Tom has developed a very specific and detailed approach to discovering and freeing the centres the actor needs to reach characters not usually associated with their repertoire. Key to his approach is the assumption that everything is movement – thought, gesture, emotion, memory, voice – and that through examining our inner resources of sensing, thinking, intuiting and feeling, and experiencing them in all their combinations, we can begin to comprehend and express the world in ways we never thought possible. We can truly transform in performance and not simply rely on outer technique. 
 
The work is not for everyone. It is very intense – the order very tall – but the process of discovery can be thrilling and the outcome in performance well worth the investigation.