Jaime Mears is an Australian actor, director and internationally recognised theatre teacher whose work sits at the intersection of Bouffon, Clown, Le Jeu, improvisation and physical theatre.

A graduate of NIDA and a Churchill Fellow, Jaime spent two years training at École Philippe Gaulier in Paris, before being invited to assist Philippe Gaulier himself in Neutral Mask and Greek Tragedy in 2010. Her subsequent training has included work with Anne Bogart and SITI Company, Keith Johnstone and Complicité.

Over more than twenty years as a performer and teacher, Jaime has taught actors, theatre-makers and professional clowns across Australia, the UK, Canada, the USA, Portugal, Denmark, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Latvia, Hungary, Finland, Russia and beyond. Her teaching has taken her from drama schools and independent actor-training studios to international theatre companies and some of Europe’s leading healthcare-clown organisations.

What distinguishes Jaime as a teacher is not simply her technical knowledge, but her ability to create the conditions in which performers become braver, more playful and more theatrically alive. Her teaching is rigorous without becoming rigid, irreverent without becoming careless, and deeply attentive to the individual performer. She has a particular gift for recognising where an actor is playing safe, then finding the game, provocation or permission that allows something much larger to appear.