Joyce Yoo
VOICE OVER ACTOR
About Yoo (That's Me)
Oh. My. God. Becky. I was like, totally born in the 80s and raised in like, The Valley. But don't worry, I don't talk like that most of the time. Growing up in this bodacious era in a bilingual Korean-English household did color my love for voices, accents, and all things language. Saturday morning cartoons were a staple for me, and I had a Berenstain Bears Read Along book with cassette tape, with one blank side for kids to record their own voices. And did I ever. I also periodically recorded made-up radio shows with my brother and cousins under the super cool moniker Stacy Tracy. I wish I still had the tapes from those, but the goofy weirdness they encapsulated lives on in me.
My family bounced between the West and East coasts every few years, so I got used to picking up accents and local phrases. "Did you eat yet" in New Jersey is "Jeet yet," in Pittsburgh it's "Jeet jet," and in Los Angeles it's "Have you nourished your vessel yet?" After high school, I settled down in L.A. for the next 20 years. I studied Linguistics and Anthropology at UCLA where one of my favorite classes was Phonetics, which was basically 30 of us making sounds with our mouths for an hour every week.
I've worked in corporate settings for 15+ years, including in marketing and training, which sure comes in handy for commercial, e-learning, and corporate narration voice over. But my first love is acting, ever since those Berenstain Bears days. In addition to voice over, I've done the kind of performing where people see my face and body, like improv at the Upright Citizens Brigade and stand-up comedy. I've also produced and starred in some independent films, including a low budget Christmas-horror-comedy feature called Violent Night: The Movie. Then there was that time my husband and I filmed our own wedding, which took place on a ledge several hundred feet up the face of El Capitan in Yosemite, and turned it into an award-winning documentary called El Cap Wedding. We wanted to set the world record for fastest time to fulfill the vows "'Til death do us part." Too dark? Alright, let's bring it home with some fun stuff:
I love board games, party games, and puzzles. My husband Shane and I enjoy hiking and rock climbing in Las Vegas where we now live. I'm super into interspecies friendships and crying at reality competition shows. But my favorite thing is working on creative projects with other people. So, let's collaborate on something soon!
