Eliza VanCort
Senior women still get talked over in their own meetings. The fix is not assertiveness training repackaged. It is a working knowledge of how voice, body and language operate inside power structures designed for someone else, and the discipline to use that knowledge under pressure.
Eliza VanCort is a communication strategist and bestselling author who teaches women and underrepresented leaders to claim physical, vocal and conversational space inside organisations built around other people’s authority.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Eliza VanCort
- A working method for executive presence rooted in Meisner acting technique, not generic confidence coaching. Voice, posture and physicality are treated as trainable instruments, not personality traits.
- An intersectional lens that takes inclusion past slogans. Her sessions address how mansplaining, interruption, and microaggression actually move through a meeting, and what a leader can do in the moment.
- A bestselling book, A Woman’s Guide to Claiming Space, that gives delegates a structured framework before and after the room, with named behaviours and language.
- Mainstream media reach. Appearances on The Drew Barrymore Show, Forbes, Fast Company and CNBC give her work cultural traction outside corporate L&D, which travels with audiences.
- Co-founder of Think Twice Labs with Alma Derricks, former CMO of Cirque du Soleil, building emotional intelligence and cross-difference communication tools used inside organisations.
Biography highlights
- Author of A Woman’s Guide to Claiming Space: Stand Tall. Raise Your Voice. Be Heard, Berrett-Koehler, May 2021.
- Cook House Fellow, Cornell University.
- TEDxRochester speaker, “Women, Power and Revolutionizing Speech”.
- Founder of The Actor’s Workshop of Ithaca, a Meisner Technique studio.
- Co-founder of Think Twice Labs with Alma Derricks, former CMO of Cirque du Soleil.
- Featured in The Drew Barrymore Show, Forbes, Fast Company, CNBC, and Success magazine.
Biography
Most executive presence work treats authority as a personality trait. Eliza VanCort treats it as a craft. Her starting point is that voice, posture and language are trainable instruments, the same way an actor’s are, and that women and underrepresented leaders are routinely operating those instruments inside rooms that were not built for them.
That argument has a specific origin. She founded The Actor’s Workshop of Ithaca, the region’s Meisner Technique studio, and spent years teaching how performers hold a stage. She then applied the same discipline to meeting rooms and boardrooms. A Woman’s Guide to Claiming Space, published by Berrett-Koehler in 2021, sets out the framework: five behaviours that shift how a leader is read, from posture and vocal placement to ending self-sabotage and building cross-difference coalitions.
The work has reach beyond corporate L&D. Her TEDxRochester talk on women, power and speech has been viewed widely. Appearances on The Drew Barrymore Show, Forbes, Fast Company and CNBC have built a public audience of more than 250,000 followers. Inside organisations, she co-founded Think Twice Labs with Alma Derricks, former CMO of Cirque du Soleil, to translate the same material into emotional intelligence and communication tools teams can use across difference.
She is a Cook House Fellow at Cornell University and an advisory board member of Performing Arts for Social Change. The intellectual frame is intersectional: most of her organisational work is about what happens to people with less institutional power when they intersect with structures designed around someone else’s authority. The output is concrete. Delegates leave with named behaviours, specific language and a vocabulary for the dynamics they have been navigating without naming for years.
Key speaking topics
- Executive presence and communication craft
- Women in leadership and the politics of voice
- Anti-racist and cross-difference communication
- Emotional intelligence in senior teams
- Inclusion under pressure
- Confidence, posture and physicality for leaders
- Power dynamics in everyday workplace interaction
Ideal for
- CHROs and chief people officers building executive-presence programmes for senior women
- Leadership-development leads designing high-potential and sponsorship pathways
- ERG sponsors and DEI heads commissioning substantive, non-performative inclusion content
- Senior women’s leadership summits, partner-track development programmes, and emerging-leader cohorts
Audience outcomes
- A vocabulary for the meeting-room behaviours that quietly cost women authority, and language to interrupt them in the moment
- Specific techniques for voice, posture and physicality drawn from Meisner training, applied to senior business settings
- A framework from A Woman’s Guide to Claiming Space delegates can carry back into their teams
- Practical anti-racist and cross-difference communication moves that work inside live conversations, not only in policy documents
- A clearer reading of how power moves through an organisation’s everyday talk, and where to act on it
Talks
A working session on how women lose authority in everyday workplace interaction and the specific behaviours that take it back.
Key takeaways:
- The five claiming-space behaviours from VanCort’s bestselling book, translated into senior business settings
- How to handle mansplaining, interruption and credit-taking in the moment, not afterward
- Voice and posture techniques drawn from Meisner training, applied to boardrooms and stages
A session on the communication choices senior leaders make when navigating relationships, hierarchy and competing organisational interests.
Key takeaways:
- How to keep candour and authority intact when the room has political risk
- Communication moves that build durable cross-functional relationships
- Reading the emotional sub-text of a meeting and responding to it without losing the agenda
Originally commissioned by MIT’s Office of Minority Education, this session gives leaders practical language and behaviour for cross-difference communication.
Key takeaways:
- A working definition of anti-racist communication that goes past statements and into daily practice
- How to interrupt microaggression in a meeting without derailing it
- Specific moves for leaders building inclusion as an operating capability, not a campaign