Susan Batson

Actor, writer, director, producer, teacher, and coach Susan Batson has been called a "technician of the spirit" by the New Yorker. In private consultation on film sets all over the world, and in her New York- and Hollywood- based Black Nexxus acting studios, Susan Batson has enjoyed the privilege of working with Nicole Kidman, Juliette Binoche, Tom Cruise, Jennifer Lopez, Chris Rock, Jamie Foxx, Sean 'Diddy' Combs, Liv Tyler, Jennifer Connelly, and countless other actors searching for truthful connections between themselves and the characters that they play. Nicole Kidman, who has worked closely with Susan for more than twelve years, hails her as a uniquely insightful acting coach with "a hell of a lot of pure talent," while Oscar winner Juliet Binoche praises Susan's ability to "shake you like a tree and get the fruits down." Susan Batson was publicly thanked by Kidman during Kidman's post-Oscar-win press conference for The Hours (2002), and by Tom Cruise in his Golden Globes acceptance speech for Magnolia (1999).

Born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, Batson began her lifelong excursion into the art of acting at Adele Thane's Boston Children's Theater. She graduated from Emerson College's Theater Arts Program and received a John Hay Whitney Fellowship to study with Lee Strasberg, Uta Hagen, and Herbert Berghof in New York. She was in the original cast of Hair and became a protégé of theater legends Joseph Papp and Harold Clurman, a member of the Actor's Studio, and a recipient of a New York Drama Critics Award, an LA Drama Critics Award, and an Obie. She has consulted with writer/director Spike Lee on several of his films and was a producer of the hugely successful Broadway revival and television production of _Raisin in the Sun, A (2007) (TV)_, starring Sean Combs.

Batson's mother, the late Ruth M. Batson, a tenured professor of psychiatry at Boston University, headed the Massachusetts NAACP in the sixties and was the first black woman appointed to the Democratic National Committee and an architect of Boston's pioneering school desegregation initiative. In the spirit of equal opportunity and advancement through education that her mother personified, Black Nexxus (jointly operated with Susan's son Carl Ford), remains open 365 days a year, and Susan Batson remains available to her legion of loyal clients twenty-four hours a day.

Susan Batson is the author of the book "Truth: Personas, Needs, and Flaws In The Art of Building Actors and Creating Characters" and has been profiled in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, and Backstage.