Michael Buffo – Artistic Director

Michael Buffo is an actor, director, and Body/Mind Counselor. After getting his BA in Drama from San Francisco State University, he left for Hollywood the morning after his graduation. During the past six years in Los Angeles, along with appearing in dozens of Shakespeare plays, many short films, and a few feature films, he has written, directed, and edited numerous short films, a collection of commercials, and a tribute documentary to his father’s life. He is the school’s director and editor.

With the background of his youth and young-adulthood spent entirely on the stage while being able to process those experiences in the healing-arts classroom, his perspective on the actor’s existence is unlike any other of his age. The result is a “relentlessly positive” approach to teaching and directing.

Michael received a unique combination of two influences. Being raised by masters of perceiving the unseen anatomy of the individual, his father and step-mother, Dan Buffo and Deborah Allen, are leaders in the global community of creating the group experience to support the individual to live the life they came to live. While receiving this kind of modeling at home, in the world, Michael was supported by this loving container to pursue the career of an actor. John Farmanesh-Bocca, a master of will-power, inspiration, and a military-like advanced physical approach to acting, discovered Michael as a boy and mentored him in the art of performance with the Performing Arts Conservatory of Carmel (PACC) and as he became a man within the training programs that followed. (Link to Pericles Redux video: 5min.)

Performing classical texts with a post-modern approach tainted with sooth-saying humor, Michael is a company member of John’s Not Man Apart Physical Theatre Ensemble which is world recognized as a budding stage presence to be followed.  During this formative journey, Michael became one of the youngest individuals to be included into a community of healers in Los Angeles led by Laura Fine who is dedicated to hold sacred the mystery of the group experience to bring about the individual’s soul-driven transformation. Literally leaving a heart in the theatre behind, Laura has stepped towards the life she leads as a challenger to the limiting core-beliefs of her students and their corresponding energetic imbalances to create the Lionheart Institute of Transpersonal Energy Healing.

Upon graduating Lionheart and stepping more into a teaching role, Michael is working with Laura to turn his focus back to the actor’s existence with the knowledge of the anatomy of the energetic system of the body he acquired from Laura, his father, and the other faculty at Lionheart.

There is an opportunity sneaking up in the hearts of the willing. Senses are available for development in the body, mind, and spirit of the actor that will give those who study this approach an edge to their careers on every level of their being. Mentored by Laura Fine and fellow teacher of the Energy System of Acting, Michele Shay (who has just begun a teaching residency at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts), Michael’s HARA Motion Picture Conservatory will challenge actors to approach their screen presence differently and provide a container for their experiments in the classroom to stick.