Written by Alex Alexander
For LSTFI faculty member Madeline Jaye, the line between teaching and performing has never been a boundary — it’s been a feedback loop, and her debut solo show is the latest proof.
About Madeline Jaye
Jaye’s artistic training began in earnest at the New Jersey School of Ballet, them home to teachers from the New York City Ballet, before expanding into modern, tap, and gymnastics. She graduated high school early, spent time studying abroad in Switzerland, and even performed in a professional dance show in Cairo during her years at Butler University.
Jaye arrived in New York City at 21 with a foundation that was already unusually broad. She kept building on it — commercial technique, scene study, acting technique — and steadily moved from chorus dancer to fully realized triple threat, equally at home as a dancer, actor, and what she calls a “utility singer.” Work with the renowned Radio City Rockettes and in professional musical theater followed, all while she continued training and developing as a creator.
Jaye and LSTFI
Jaye joined the faculty at the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute in 1995 as a dance teacher, initially through the Institute’s partnership with New York University. She describes the role as one that let her stay artistically alive while building a life outside the studio, supported by LSTFI leadership to continue growing and working as a performer. Over the years, her role deepened and expanded from NYU classes into the Institute itself, where she developed original movement work tailored specifically to actors: physical exercises designed to integrate The Method, ground performers in their bodies, and bring them into genuine presence. She teaches this work and more in her Movement for Method Actors classes.
The Institute’s commitment to faculty who are actively working artists, not just teachers, is something Jaye names as part of what has kept her here. “They want teachers to nurture their own talent,” she says of LSTFI’s ethos. Faculty are fulfilled not only as guides of the next generation but as individual artists. An added benefit for the students, these teachers also become reporters from the front lines of the industry. Jaye shared fondly the stories of bringing current, lived experience into the classroom: the highs and lows of auditions left in tears of joy and frustration; intel about current trends among producers; and most importantly, the personal journey of being a working artist and developing your own practice.
The Institute also supports faculty that are focused primarily, or even solely, on teaching, as well as the working-performer-teachers. Jaye praises her colleagues whose primary focus is their teaching journey, saying that it gives the students the most well-rounded instruction, something all LTSFI students know to be true.
On Teaching and Being a Working Artist
For Jaye, teaching is not what happens when you’re not performing — it’s its own creative act. The students at LSTFI are part of what sustains that energy: a genuinely diverse group, in terms of background, body, training, and expectation, who keep the work from going stale. Her own unconventional path, navigating injuries, a body that didn’t fit the mold, and institutional dismissal, all shaped her into a teacher who knows how to work around a problem rather than be stopped by it.
This exchange runs in both directions. Being directed in her own show reminded her of the same generosity she asks of her students: that there is not only one path to a true moment, and that trusting another artist’s instincts is its own skill. “As an actor, I’m always relearning that truth from my students,” Jaye reflects, “and as a teacher, I remember to be generous with other people’s process.”
Dementia and Other Exit Strategies
Dementia and Other Exit Strategies emerged not from a plan but from necessity. Specifically, the exhausted, darkly funny necessity of being the primary caregiver for two aging parents while raising two children, all while maintaining a full teaching and coaching schedule. While caring for her father as his health declined, and her mother as her memory issues increased, Jaye came home and shared hilariously tragic stories, full of “gallows humor”, with her husband. Eventually, Jaye began writing down what happened each day as a simple exercise, using what she calls her “mull and blurt” method, with encouragement from her husband and then a women’s artist collective she joined through a friend.
The brain-dumps-turned-monologues accumulated quietly, with no agenda, until by November 2024 a full play existed. In the precious and limited holiday break between semesters, while juggling teaching commitments and family, Jaye arranged the writings into something cohesive over a marathon fifteen-hour session, cut ruthlessly, and emerged from the blue-light haze with a show. She had a reading in January for twenty-five people — an experience she describes as physically overwhelming in its intimacy.
Theatre 4the People Festival
The show received its first full staging in November 2025 as part of a solo festival at Theatre 4The People. Following her intuition and strong self-knowledge, Jaye leaned on a core technique of The Method, the place exercise, to design the set herself. She knew how critical the set would be, not only to provide a frame for work to shine on but also because following her artistic intuition was a critical component of the piece. Inspired by Shel Silverstein’s hand-drawn illustration, the set was perfectly imperfect, made of cardboard and assembled into three dimensions on stage, anchored by a large sculptural dog.
The feedback loop, it turns out, runs deeper than classroom and stage. It runs through grief, caregiving, humor, and the particular courage it takes to stand alone in a room full of people and tell the truth. Jaye has been training for this her whole career, she just didn’t know it yet.