Joan Baker

Joan Baker is an American actress and author. She is also the co-founder and vice president of the Society of Voice Arts and Sciences, a professional organization for voice-over artists. Baker's 2005 book, Secrets of Voice-Over Success, chronicles the careers of a number of America's top voice actors with the intent of providing career guidance to aspiring and existing voice-over professionals. Her credits include shows such as Saturday Night Live and Guiding Light, and she has done voice-overs for the anime film MD Geist and for the Grand Theft Auto series. Baker has also won multiple TellyAwards and Promax Awards for her work.

Career Baker began acting in local theater at the age of 10. After participating in the Marin County Shakespeare Festival for two years, she attracted the attention of the Brebner Agency, a talent agency in San Francisco. Shortly after signing with Brebner, Baker was cast in a local children's TV show called Whatchamacallit in 1972. She had also started to study dance and appeared in dance shows and joined the theater company at the Belrose Performing Arts Center.

In 1980, Baker received a scholarship to study dance at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York City. She also continued to study acting and auditioned on Broadway.

In 2005, Baker published Secrets to Voice-over Success, a book in which she discussed her own experiences in the voice-over industry and interviewed a number of other voice-over professionals. Baker's idea for the book was born from a project for a class she was taking shortly after her father died from Alzheimer's disease in 2003. The goal of the project was to create something that impacted one's community. Baker chose the voice-over community as her focus, though she had also become determined to contribute to the cause of fighting Alzheimer's. She decided early on to contribute all of her book's royalties to the Alzheimer's Association, and two of the questions that she asked everyone she interviewed for the book were inspired directly by how her father losing his ability to speak had impacted her perspective on how people communicate.

In 2013, Baker and Gaskins co-founded the Society of Voice Arts and Sciences (SOVAS) as an outgrowth of the professional community that had been built around the career expo. The same year, the Voice Arts Awards were introduced as the capstone event for the expo. Baker continues to perform as a voice-over artist as well as providing coaching and giving educational lectures about the art of voice-over as well as the industry itself. She is also the first voice-over artist to have an endorsement agreement with Neumann Mics. In 2022, Baker accepted a position as an adjunct professor at the Hartt Theatre Division at the University of Hartford and is developing the school's first voice acting curriculum.