Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Isaiah Regisford. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Isaiah thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

As a person on the Autism Spectrum growing up I’ve always had a hard time understanding nuance, until I got into voice acting classes and learning and understanding characters nuances. Even in taking classes in the beginning was challenging and I had learn about my own process and my brain in how I process things in general. The thing that helped me the most from my Amazing Voice Acting mentor Julie Maddalena taught me to ask questions and getting curious about your characters and so much more and I was able to let her know about my struggles of putting myself into the character shoes. Overtime in the years I’ve learned from a class of the Fantastic Genius Casting & Voice Director Andrea Toyias that stuck with me is “The more that you put yourself in your character shoes and connect with them, even finding one thing relatable and making strong choices and trusting yourself, That’s where all the magic happens to make the character come to life.” That what I’ve taken away from all the teaching’s from these masters of the art. It allowed me to trust the fruits my training and my acting instincts and most importantly having fun! So that’s pretty much it and i’m still learning and continue to grow as a artist the work never stops.

Isaiah, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Growing up as a Autistic African American kid Born and raised in LA, I have always had a love for Animation, Superheroes, Video Games and Movies. Those outlets allowed me to express my Goofy, Animated, Weird side and also reciting and reenacting lines from my favorites from those medias that I still do to this day. I’ve always knew that I was different from Neurotypical kids growing up but not at the same time, my parents found out about my diagnosis when i was 3 years old and they supported me every step of the way in my development it made a huge positive impact in my life and internally grateful for that support and care. I remember I was hanging with some friends outside of school at the time in 2nd grade they were making a line reference to the TMNT (2007) Animated movie and after they said it I finished the line I kept going and playing out the scene and they were looking at me like “what were you doing just now?” like that was a weird thing to do. After I Graduated from private school called The Help Group that my parents fought for me to be in from 3rd grade to 12th grade, I went to a Vocational Education program and I was a intern in retail and I was so miserable and depressed and I didn’t know what I wanted to do long term. While watching a Anime show one my favorite Voice Actors Crispin Freeman was in a lot of the anime’s I’ve loved to watch when I was teenager and i’ve always been curious on “how do they get voices to be in animation?” When I looked on his website he teaches voice acting classes and I immediately went to my dad and said I wanted to do this anime dubbing workshop class of his and ever since then I knew I wanted to do more of this. So I dropped out of the program I studied under Julie Maddalena and Tony Oliver at AiVA (Adventures In Voice Acting) and Richard Horvitz. The rest is history, I’ve been doing it for 9 years now and I still feel like a baby at it and I love the fact there is so much to learn and grow at the craft and I know this is something I want to do for the rest of my life. My mission as a voice actor is whatever character and story that a person is experiencing is that they felt emotions, seen, heard, validated, inspired in a Hero or Villain or a Goofy Creature I play in impactful way through a journey in the art form, that’s the ticket for me. Just to help people and hopefully inspire to tap into their creative passions and love for life in anyway.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Like any artist the ups & downs can be really good and really rough. The constant energy of putting yourself out there and the constant waiting for the creative ideas and especially the big opportunities can be exhausting. I still deal with that sometimes when my mind projects about the future and thoughts of “If I’m going to make it” or “I need to do everything in the world to achieve the life I want”. Which living in your own head can give you the WORST doubts and stories about yourself. What helps me, of this saying that I’ve learned is that “The practice is more important than the opportunities” because when the opportunities come, you will be ready and that’s something I practice the best way I can in my career. Doing short films and passion projects with friends and colleagues, background work, commercials, music videos, skits etc. are things that put me in the artist space and the creative energy always flowing whenever I get the chance be part of a project and also connecting and meeting other artist/creatives is a huge part in the business of anything and building quality relationships. The artist journey is non liner. Most importantly to do things for myself to stay grounded and to support myself through the hard seasons and to take a break from the art to be refreshed and to regain the love and fun for it. I practice to take care of my art and myself as a human being and being with a strong support system of friends and family that see you, makes a huge difference.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

I think the best way to support artist, if people genuinely love the artists art the best thing to do is share their art, engage with it share the likes and dislikes about the art in a constructive way. Most importantly a community thrives with unity and helping each other and if you have the keys, resources, and the people to help create a project and to level everybody up to not only get experience of making a passion project pay or no pay, the skies the limit and grow those relationships. Always continue to grow your art but nobody can do life by themselves, all art is a team effort to make a film, song, art piece portrait etc. Also if you have a opportunity and you know some one in your ecosystem that can do the job well in whatever art form send it to them, it leaves an impact more than you know. If you have the resources to create use what you have, you don’t need to have the “perfect” set up to start up whatever you want to do. A quote from my all time favorite WWE Wrestler CM Punk, “If you want to go fast you go alone, If you want to go far you go together.”

Contact Info:

• Website: https://isaiahregisford.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iregg_vo

Image Credits
The 8 photos by Photographer Shaun-Andru