A JANE OF ALL TRADES…AND A MASTER OF ONE!

Barri Tsavaris is an international voiceover talent. She was the voice of the 2018 Winter Olympics. She’s known in Seoul as the “Queen of Textbooks.” And her voice welcomes countless passengers on Korea’s high-speed KTX train each day. But it took work to get here. Years prior, she gathered first-hand knowledge of the boardrooms of New York. She studied film at Boston University. She taught students of all ages and performed in improv and theater venues around the world. Using all that experience, Barri created a voice with true versatility. It’s suitable for everything from children’s cartoons to commercials, from video games to warm business narrations.

When you give Barri a script, she doesn’t just see the words:
she sees what’s needed to make them heard.

Barri was voice acting before she even knew what voice acting was! At 12 years old, Barri was selected out of hundreds of competitors to be the announcer at a taping of Nickelodeon’s “Don’t Just Sit There,” with her audio being used for the entire series. The following year, she was behind the mic on a daily basis delivering the morning announcements at her junior high school. It would be years before Barri would realize she could be a voice actor professionally, but her childhood experiences behind the mic laid the foundation for her future career.

Barri studied film and acting at Boston University, where she learned both storytelling skills and the technical talent required to tell those stories over visual and auditory mediums. She took to video editing right away, and has fond memories of spending several hours at a time in the basement editing booths of BU’s Communications building, getting a feel for the nuances in audio manipulation and how powerfully a message can be altered via the slightest change in the voice that tells it.

Back in New York City, Barri was studying improv comedy and sketch writing at the famous Gotham City Improv and The Upright Citizens Brigade. She became a regular performer at GCI and taught an “Improv to Sketch” course there. Barri’s experience shaping those improv muscles not only taught her resilience and adaptability, but also fanned the flames of her creative spark, all skills she’s found invaluable in the sound booth on those times when everyone — client, studio, and talent — are trying to find that elusive “sweet spot” in a recording. It’s not always easy for clients to explain exactly what they’re going for or want in a read: Barri’s formidable improv and theater skills mean she’s talented at picking up on cues and ideas from others, even when they’re not made explicit.

A born leader, Barri was a recipient of the prestigious Scarlet Key Award in Leadership at Boston University, honored for her work as a student leader and founder of the women’s theatre company, Athena’s Players. Barri was one of the first ever university directors of “The Vagina Monologues,” and sat on a filmed panel with Eve Ensler for the HBO special about the Vagina Monologues which aired in 2002. Since then, Barri has been a part of almost a dozen productions of The Vagina Monologues as a producer, director and performer and has raised thousands of dollars for various women’s charities in the US and Korea.

Barri was recognized for EXCELLENCE IN VOICEOVER by Arirang Television in South Korea for her work dubbing popular Korean television dramas into English for international distribution. Most notably, Barri is the English voice of Korean actresses Song Hye-kyo and Seo Hyun-jin on the hit dramas “Descendants of the Sun” and “Another Miss Oh,” respectively, as well as the voice of Kim Ji-soo as Queen Mother Ji-so on “The Hwarang.”

Barri performs regularly on stage in Seoul with Seoul Players and Seoul Shakespeare Company. She is also a produced playwright and her play “I Will Follow,” a semi-autobiographical tale of a woman who finds herself through the music of U2, debuted in the New York International Fringe Festival.

Barri is the Co-Producer & Audio Director of TIGHTS, a radio play about superheroes and their alter egos. She is a leader in Seoul’s voiceover and theatre communities, and a mentor to several voice actors coming up the ranks in the Korean market.

She speaks tourist-grade French and wannabe Korean.