In early 2026, as I started a year with new ambitions, I launched The Acting Coach on Substack.

In recent years I have come to see writing as part of my practice. It makes visible the moments and experiences that slip past in training, turns them into reusable tools, and sharpens my understanding of underlying principles by filling in gaps I had not seen. This column extends that work. I write from within the work of acting coaching between the UK and China, and from a sense of my identity being ‘split’ within a bicultural life, an experience that also shapes how I understand and work with training.

I track how training misfires across languages and cultures, particularly how it affects non-native English speakers in auditions and drama-school classrooms; where the most basic yet overlooked things go wrong and why; and how training, teaching and research methods can improve. I also follow the working conditions, professional dignity and wellbeing of acting coaches in the industry.

This may grow into a field-based collection of critical, reflective essays on practice. The opening piece seems personal at first; it moves from a time when I kept writing deliberately at a distance to treating it as practice, and in doing so opens onto larger questions of industry bias, self-identity and how practice-as-research develops.