Now based in Washington, DC, she has worked with the following area companies: The Welders, Faction of Fools Theatre Company, Nu Sass Productions, Brave Spirits Theatre, Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, Adventure Theatre MTC, and Discovery Theatre at the Smithsonian Institution. She serves as a Co-Artistic Director of Faction of Fools (www.factionoffools.org), a Commedia company in DC. She also regularly performs in Faction’s shows and as a company member. She teaches clown, Commedia, and devising at in the Performing and Visual Arts magnet program at Annapolis High School in Anne Arundel County, MD. She has also taught Commedia workshops at Episcopal High School, Thomas Jefferson High School, and Trinity High School in Virginia. She is also a certified teacher of Elemental Body Alignment System (EBAS). Her work as a translator is featured in The Routledge Companion to Commedia dell’arte. She is also a proud c0-devisor of LadyM, a dark clown piece about witches and menstruation, with Rachel Hynes, Anastasia Wilson, and Vanita Kalra. In 2017, LadyM received a grant from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities which funded research on DC menstruators on their attitudes toward their periods. A new, full-length production of LadyM, informed by these 400 collected surveys was produced by the Welders in July 2019.

She is a pioneer in the field of Voice in the Mask and is also most known for collaborative devising, ensemble building, Voicework for original and devised performance and experimental voice. She continues to teach private singing lessons out of her home studio. She has taught voice in the mask and commedia with Tut’Zanni and the Accademia dell’Arte at various universities and high schools throughout the United States. 

As a singer, Dory has had various opera and musical theatre roles and has been the lead singer of many bands. Her album Pages of Yesterday, which she co-produced with singer-songwriter J. Paul Moore, is a tribute to her late father, former rockabilly/folk musician, Jimmy Ford.

Dory has been an integral member of the Arezzo artistic community and has performed in and organized several events including the ArezzoFestival  - festival for International University performances (2006 - 2010), the CrisisART Festival (Collective Facilitator) - festival for young emerging artists and companies from all over the world (2012 to 2014) and is a founding member of the Collaborative Arts Lab - an association that creates space for artistic experimentation and creation. She has worked tirelessly to develop and grow the Accademia dell’Arte from both an administrative and pedagogic standpoint creating and working in several roles since its beginnings. Besides teaching, she currently serves as the Inter-Program Associate and Director of Short-term Programs. She is the representative for Academic Life on the Communications Team and founded the ADA Alumni Association (President). As a mother-artist, Dory supports the Parent Artist Advocacy League (PAAL) and was recently chosen to participate in Mama Is A Maker (#mamaisamaker), an artistic residency in motherhood. She is also a member of VASTA and Sigma Alpha Iota Music Fraternity (Alumni). Dory is most proud of her two beautiful children and grateful for her jack-of-all trades husband who remains her rock and biggest support.

Echo has been teaching for almost 2 decades and she has taken her diverse acting and singing training and performance experience to create her own teaching style. This technique, “The Active Voice,” teaches singers and actors how to fully utilize and access their emotions and the abilities of their instruments, which allows them to interpret and communicate their character’s needs in a new and freeing way, whether through acting or singing and regardless of the style. Echo has coached every style of singing from Opera to Metal. At the university level, Echo taught for the University of Arkansas, in the music and drama departments, for 9 years. Since 2007, she has coached students, of all ages from the community, at the Academy of the Arts at the University of Arkansas in Fort Smith, which she continues to do through Skype. In 2011, she became the vocal coach of the Belting/Rock technique for Musical Theatre and later a vocal instructor for the drama and music departments of Tulsa University. She also taught drama and play development camps for Arts Live Theatre and The Boy’s and Girl’s Club. She was a vocal coach for the NAMA nominated bands Storm The Castle! and The Early Morning Bourbon Girls, whom she also performed alongside.

As well as a teacher and performer Echo is a writer and director. As well as being a co-founder of Women From Mars, which is a group of devising artists, she wrote and directed two one-woman shows entitled, Shot Through the Heart and Flippin Channels in the Estrogen Zone, the later of which was premiered at Nadine Baum Studios at the Walton Arts Center and in Tuscany at The Crisis Art Festival in Arezzo, Italy to an international audience. She also performed it at the Chicago Sketch Comedy Festival in January 2014 and afterwards she toured her show through the Southern States before returning to Chicago and performing it at the Public House Theatre. While in Chicago Echo also did a stand up comedy version of her show at three different venues and since the show features many musical parodies, she recorded and released an album of the songs from the show especially for this tour. 
Echo also teaches a variety of workshops on how to write your own musical, act while singing and how to audition for musical theatre. In 2012 she co-presented different writing techniques for one person shows at the SETC’s to actors from the industry. She led a similar workshop in 2015 at The Crisis Art Festival titled Techniques for Writing One Wo(Man) Shows.

In 2010 she came to Italy to tour Liguria and she sang Opera and Musical Theatre in Genoa, Chiavari, Rapallo, and Piove di Teco, Italy. While there she also played Ariel in Shakespeare’s The Tempest or La Tempesta for il Festivale di Valle Christi (It was performed in Italian.) She composed and sang four original pieces on the guitar for this show and co-wrote one piece with Jim Goza. It was while she was there that she met her Italian husband, Raffaele Abbate, the music producer and owner of OrangeHomeRecords.

In the summer of 2011, Echo toured Liguria, Italy with Signore Corsi, renowned Italian guitarist, performing at such Jazz festivals as Jazz and Wine in Cavi Borgo, Italy. In December of that same year, while back in Arkansas, she was a featured soloist with the Symphony of Northwest Arkansas, conducted by Paul Haas, for the Christmas Pops concert.

Currently Echo coaches and teaches singing to other musicians and singers privately and at OrangeHomeRecords, where she also acts as a studio background vocalist. She has performed on the records of such artists as The Good Fear, Lorenzo Capello, Cristina Nico, Freddi Delcuratolo, Stefano Barotti and the soon to be released album of the late and great Roberta Alloisio. She also teaches Acting for Musical Theatre and Speech & Voice at Centro Formazione Artistica di Luca Bizzarri. She still sings musical theatre, jazz, opera and contemporary music in concerts around the area and has been the featured soloist on some Italian records as well. She is the featured soloist on the the single, “Ashes, Flesh and Bones,” from the soundtrack to the Italian movie, Beyond Love, and she is also a featured soloist on the song “Already Left” from the album a Dagli Appendini alle Ante by a Lorenzo Cappello, both of which can be found on iTunes. She was an actor for the Cristina Nico music video for the song “Le Creature Degli Abissi.” Her latest and greatest creative endeavors have been the raising of her five year old daughter Isabeau and the completion of her first album of original songs.