About the Instructor
Lorin Eric Salm

Lorin Eric Salm “is a very talented mime, disciplined, very dedicated and constant.”
— Marcel Marceau
Legendary mime artist

“I spent about nine months with this really brilliant guy, Lorin Eric Salm, who’s just this amazing teacher.” | “Amazing choreographer.” | “He not only choreographed these incredible routines in the movie but also worked with me to kind of make them my own.”
— Jesse Eisenberg
Academy Award^® nominated actor

“The artists deeply appreciated your philosophy and work. Several of them have made choices in the show directly as a result of your teaching.”
— Krista Monson
Director, Writer, & Casting Director
Cirque du Soleil

“Lorin Eric Salm presented one of the most extraordinary and helpful workshops for our animators that we ever could have imagined..”
— Mark Dindal, Director, and Randy Fullmer, Producer
Chicken Little and The Emperor’s New Groove
Walt Disney Feature Animation

“He was a great coach. Helped me make my stand up more expressive and animated. He is fun to work with.”
— Damon Wayans
Emmy Award-nominated actor and comedian

With thirty years experience in Theatrical Mime and theatre, Lorin Eric Salm brings an approach to the art little known in the United States. He views mime as a theatrical art, using the magic of illusion and the power of silence to create comic and dramatic physical performance for the stage.

Lorin Eric Salm was trained by the legendary, world-renowned master of mime Marcel Marceau, and is a graduate of Marceau’s École Internationale de Mimodrame de Paris (Paris International School of Mimodrama, 3-year program). He studied Etienne Decroux’s Corporeal Mime under former Decroux assistants Corinne Soum and Steven Wasson, and former Decroux student Ivan Bacciocchi, and also studied with Polish mime master Stefan Niedzialkowski. He holds a B.A. in Theatre Arts from California State University, Northridge.

Lorin has performed in Paris with Marcel Marceau and in his own one-man show C’est-à-dire . . . (That is to Say . . .), as well as in Israel, New York, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. In addition to acting work in theatre, film, and television, he is a character movement reference actor and motion capture actor for animated films and television series.

Lorin has taught mime theatre to mime artists, actors, improvisers, dancers, circus artists, comedians, storytellers, magicians, circus performers, jugglers, singers, ice skaters, and other performers, both student and professional, and has been a recurring guest instructor for Cirque du Soleil’s Las Vegas productions and touring shows. He has also taught mime and character movement skills to animators at Walt Disney Feature Animation, DreamWorks Animation, and Sony Pictures Imageworks, working with the teams that created the feature films Shrek (DreamWorks), Chicken Little (Disney), and Dinosaur (Disney). Based in Los Angeles, he is a frequent mime coach and movement coach and consultant to the Hollywood film and television industries. Notably, he trained Academy Award-nominated actor Jesse Eisenberg to play Marcel Marceau, and choreographed the mime scenes, for the 2020 feature film Resistance.

Lorin has become a world resource for the international mime theatre community by his authorship and administration of The World of Mime Theatre, the Internet’s first website on the art of mime theatre, created in 1996. His efforts continue to further international appreciation of mime theatre, and have earned him the recognition of mime professionals and enthusiasts around the world. Lorin received the 2019-2020 Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute Research Award from Ohio State University, in order to conduct research in their Marcel Marceau Collections.

Some of the places Lorin has taught or lectured:

Cirque du Soleil

The School for Theatre Creators

Walt Disney Feature Animation

DreamWorks Animation

Sony Pictures Imageworks

Rhythm & Hues Studios

Bento Box Entertainment

California Institute of the Arts ( CalArts )

Ohio State University Dept. of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts; and Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD)

UCLA Dept. of Art

California State Polytechnic University Pomona Dept. of Music

Queensland University of Technology Depts. of Animation, Dance, and Creative Industries — Brisbane, Australia

Ann Arbor Mime Workshop

Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum

iO West Theater

Pasadena Civic Ballet Center

California State University, Northridge – Teenage Drama Workshop

Los Angeles County High School for the Arts

The Colburn School of Performing Arts

Beverly Hills High School Dept. of Theatre

El Camino Real High School Dept. of Theatre

Vonder Haar Center for the Performing Arts

CTN Animation Expo

Bridges Institute of Visual Arts

Elisabeth Brooks Acting Workshops

Classical Theatre Lab Los Angeles

SlapCon Los Angeles Slapstick Convention

SOL-LA Music Academy

Cate School

Pacific Resident Theatre Youth Conservatory

The Collaborative professional actors group

Get Scene Studios online acting classes