Malika Samuel

Malika has nearly three decades of professional experience across stage and screen, with work spanning Broadway, television, film, and hosting. A graduate of NYU Tisch School of the Arts’ Meisner Studio, she trained under Victoria Hart, whose teaching bridged the lineages of Uta Hagen and William Esper. She currently serves as an adjunct faculty member at NYU, where she teaches the first-year progression of the Meisner Technique and directs classical, contemporary, and devised work. Her teaching practice continues to evolve through the mentorship of Nathan Flower, who first taught her as an undergraduate and now mentors her as a Meisner teacher. Malika is regularly invited to teach workshops, masterclasses, and intensives for universities, conservatories, and professional organizations nationally and internationally. She also maintains an active private coaching practice, working with actors to develop the resilience to work confidently inside uncertainty while building sustainable artistic practices grounded in rigorous process.

Beyond the theater, Malika translates the tools of performance into healthcare education by designing simulation-based learning experiences and directing and producing educational media that strengthen interpersonal communication, cognitive empathy, clinical decision-making, and the delivery of compassionate, equitable care. Her work has contributed to NIH-funded research, curricular innovation, national presentations, and peer-reviewed publications.

Whether in rehearsal, the classroom, the clinic, or onstage, Malika is drawn to the tension between our public selves and private truths and to the ways people witness, interpret, and respond to one another in moments of vulnerability, uncertainty, and tension. She is obsessed with helping actors become extraordinary investigators of human behavior. Understanding one another more fully is, and always has been, the work.