Faculty Bios

Diane Baker

Executive Director of Acting

Diane Baker studied acting and ballet in New York with Charles Conrad and Nina Fonaroff. She also studied acting in Los Angeles with Estelle Harman and years later with Stella Adler. While under contract with Twentieth Century Fox, she was introduced to director George Stevens Sr., who cast her in The Diary of Anne Frank. Diane performed in films Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Best of Everything, 300 Spartans, The Wizard of Baghdad, Nine Hours to Rama, directed by Mark Robson, and on loan-out starred with Susan Hayward in Stolen Hours in England. At Universal, she starred in Mirage with Gregory Peck, Marnie for director Alfred Hitchcock and The Prize, starring Paul Newman. She also appeared in The Joy Luck Club, The Net with Sandra Bullock, and The Cable Guy with Jim Carrey and Matthew Broderick and most recently, Harrison Montgomery with Martin Landau.

Diane has worked with Anthony Hopkins and director Jonathan Demme in The Silence of the Lambs, and her most recent television credits include Law & Order: SVU, ER with Noah Wyle and five episodes of HBO's Unscripted, directed by George Clooney. Other television credits include The Blue and the Grey, Inherit the Wind (for which she received an Emmy nomination), About Sarah, and CBS' four-hour miniseries, Jackie O, in the role of Rose Kennedy.

Diane's first effort as a producer came in the self-financed documentary, Ashiana, which dealt with the end of feudalism and the beginning of democracy in India. Several other award-winning documentaries followed, including HBO's To Climb a Mountain and Emmy-nominated Miracles in the Making. She produced the film Never Never Land in London starring Petula Clark and Cathleen Nesbitt, which opened the door for a future project, the six-hour mini-series based on Barbara Taylor Bradford's "A Woman of Substance," which received an Emmy nomination for Best Mini-Series.

She has received numerous honors and awards, including multiple Emmy and Golden Globe nominations, an Honorary Doctorate in Law from the University of Irvine in Southern California, and Cinecom Career Award in 2005 given at the legendary Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. Ms. Baker has been a Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences voting member for forty years. Additionally, Diane studied Telecommunications and Political Science at the University of Southern California. She is also on the Advisory Board of the Documentary Channel as well as coordinating member of the Oakland Film Commission Arts Task Force.

In addition, Ms. Baker has been invited to serve on many film festival juries. In the late 70's, she was the president of the jury for Northern Greece festival of Thessaloniki with Melina Mercouri, and subsequently on the jury at the International Film Festival in Bombay, India. In 1997, she was invited to the first International Film Festival in Shanghai, People's Republic of China. She was also on the Palm Springs Film Festival jury in 2005.

Diane Baker was invited to Academy of Art University to build an acting program for graduate and undergraduate students. She inaugurated the first sound stage at the university and its first black box theater, both of which are used by students in the Acting and Film programs to create their portfolios. She has recently been promoted to Executive Director of the Motion Pictures & Television and Acting School. Her future dream is to build a film center for serious filmmakers who want to make meaningful films that will inspire, educate and entertain.