About me

Welcome to the world of Meisner!

My name is Leila. I’m a performer, writer, teacher, mother and activist. Meisner technique embodies for me everything exciting about the art of acting, as well as the art of being. Meisner allows actors to become more spontaneous and connected in their acting and teaches us to embrace the whole of ourselves: the good, the bad and the ugly. By practising Meisner, we learn that the most interesting choices come from our authentic selves, not from inventing personae but from allowing our outer masks to slip off. This discovery is what I want to share with other actors.

I first came across Meisner technique at The Actors Centre in London in 2002. Many years later, I moved to Amsterdam and studied with the incomparable Steven Ditmyer, a student of Sanford Meisner, who travels the world teaching the technique. More recently, I had the good fortune to study at Studio Tambour in Berlin. If you’re in Berlin, get yourself down there and take a class!

In 2021, I started teaching at acting school Cours Florent in Berlin. While I was there I realised that Meisner technique was what I most wanted to pass on to my students. Some of them had had negative experiences with it in the past and some of them had never done it before. At the end of our time together, all of them agreed that it had given them both practical tools that they can use each time they approach a role and a greater feeling of connectedness. I decided I wanted to keep on teaching when I moved to Amsterdam. I did a teaching training course at the Meisner Institute in Los Angeles and became a designated Meisner instructor in August 2023.

Around the same time that I started to really appreciate the value of Meisner as an actor, I began taking part in protest and civil disobedience at government inaction on the climate and ecological crisis in The Netherlands and the UK. I also started writing an Amsterdam-based sitcom exploring all of the things that keep me up at night whether it’s because I’m raging, crying or laughing. It took me a while to realise that in acting, as in life, giving your whole self is where it’s at. As the great Billie Holiday sang “All of me, why not take all of me?”