PowerPlays Coaching, LLC

For fifteen years, PowerPlays has provided the business community and the litigation bar with performance-skills trainers and actors for mock trials and depositions.  We boast a diverse company of more than 50 skilled, experienced actors and performance coaches.  Here, you can read the biographies of some the actors, teachers and coaches who make up our company. 

CLE Course Designer & Instructors

Diana Hird is a tri-lingual, tri-cultural executive coach with extensive training and experience as a coach-intervener and as a facilitator. She is the founder and principal of Hird Associates.  She received a Juris Doctor from Fordham University School of Law, a Bachelor of Arts from Williams College and training in coaching and organizational development from the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland.

Diana's coaching is influenced by her experiences as both a practicing lawyer and actor/playwright. She has received training in acting technique and improvisation and performed in Off-Off Broadway productions, film and television. Her play, A Real Live Cuban, received Best Play, Best Director, and Best Actor awards at the 2007 Aery Theater Festival in Garrison, NY.

During her more than ten years practicing law, Diana has worked as a transactional lawyer and a manager with experience in complex technology development projects, and intellectual property licensing, including as legal counsel for AC Nielsen (US), Inc., Heineken USA Incorporated and TheStreet.com, Inc.; and with experience in derivatives, structured finance, mergers & acquisitions and financings as a Corporate Associate at the New York law firms Proskauer Rose, and Brown & Wood (now Sidley Austin.)

Diana is a member of the Committee on Career Advancement and Management of the Association of the Bar of the City of NNew York. She is a co-creator and teacher of PowerPlays’ Performance Skills for Litigators courses. 

Vivian Hasbrouk is a co-creator and teacher of PowerPlays’ CLE-approved Performance Skills Course “Performance Skills for Openings and Summations”, and has taught non-verbal communication and performance skills for Hofstra University and NYU Law schools.  She has been a professional master teacher/coach for actors, lawyers, and business people for over 10 years. 

Vivian has a BA in Movement Theater and Social Dynamics (cum laude) from University of South Florida .  She also completed the acting conservatory at Towson State University , where she was classically trained in voice, movement, dance, acting, and directing.  Performing credits include national tours, regional theater, summer stock (Dorset Theater Festival), Off- Broadway (Theater Row), and the Globe Shakespeare Theater in London.

As a member of New York’s award winning Interborough Repertory Theater (IRT), Vivian helped develop a critically acclaimed new acting technique called “Del-Sign”, combining the art of Francois Delsarte’s classical movement techniques and American Sign Language.  She became a staff director in 1999, directing over 10 of IRT’s touring productions, and served as Theater for Young Audiences Artistic Director for 2003-2004.

As a casting director for studio and independent films and television shows since 1993, Vivian has worked on over 20 films for such notable directors as Martin Scorsese, Mike Nichols, Gary Ross, Lisa Krueger, Stanley Tucci, Martin Brest, and Christopher Columbus.  At the 2000 Sundance Film Festival, Vivian, along with casting partner Ellen Parks, won the first ever Cast Ensemble Award for the musical film Songcatcher.  In 1995, with her husband, cameraman/director of photography Joseph Bondulich, Vivian incorporated as HB Stage and Screen.  Together they have participated in a myriad of projects; including award winning short films, documentaries, independent films, corporate industrials, television magazine stories, film festival coverage, and stage pieces.