Eliza Schneider

American actress

Eliza Jane Schneider is an American actress, singer, playwright, dialect coach and dialectologist. She has appeared on television and as a voice over actress on video games and animations. She also performs various musical and stage shows.

Schneider spent her formative years on a Chippewa reservation in Bemidji, Minnesota with her two older brothers in a mostly Jewish family. She moved to New York at the age of 8. Her father became a math and drama teacher at the School of Arts High School in Rochester, New York, where she graduated as salutatorian. Her mother was an attorney for the reservation. She started playing violin, which she learned from her grandfather, learning the Suzuki method, IT'S MY PARTY! From ages 7–20, she went to Jewish summer camp, becoming a counselor, and started performing on stage. By the time she was in the fourth grade she began writing and performing her own plays, because the teacher told her that she would only be allowed to stage a play if she "wrote, produced, directed." Four years later she was chosen for a part in Annie; Schneider's parents would not let her tour with the troupe after being cast. While in college she continued going to auditions and got the role of Sheila Brentwood in the television series The Amazing Live Sea Monkeys. For the show she was allowed to cast the actors who played her parents. After the show got canceled, she replaced Alanna Ubach as the assistant/co host for the second and third seasons of Beakman's World.

For her college senior thesis, Schneider made a cross country road tour in a former ambulance studying regional dialects. During her research into accents, she "visited all the English speaking countries in the world, conducting more than 7,000 interviews over all." The various quotes are combined into a story. When interviewed about the shows by Western Washington University newspaper The Western Front, she explained that "People in America today are scared to speak up and tell their perspective on what our nation is or where it is going I wanted to repeat the peoples' words verbatim so the audience could develop their own perspective." In a 2013 interview she explained that "to me, music, voice, voices of the people, play writing, dialect, language, violin – it all springs from the same well of fascination with sound."