Welcome to the Program in Educational Theatre at NYU Steinhardt!

Here in Educational Theatre, we’re passionate about theatre and its transformative powers. We prepare you to work with audiences of all ages and experiences and in a variety of educational settings. As a student in our program you’ll find a supportive and nurturing environment of peers and faculty who will help you reach your fullest potential.

You’ll have the opportunity to study with notable theatre educators from around the world and learn in their outstanding, unique courses. Our curriculum enables you to take a variety of courses in theatre performance and production, drama in education, and applied theatre.

Outside the classroom, there’s more to explore. After navigating remote instruction and Zoom theatre over the past two years, we‘ve found exciting and innovative ways to create educational and artistic opportunities for students and audiences. Our innovative Verbatim Performance Lab continues to create video content that helps audiences to consider their implicit biases and has expanded its education and outreach residencies and workshops to schools across the country. Our main stage production season was shifted into an online remote production environment, and though we were excited by the content we’re creating and what we’re learning through the process, we are glad to be back to in-person classes and production. And all of our work is grounded in ongoing dialogue and reflection about how theatre and education can contribute to shifting and disrupting systems of power and oppression in a variety of educational, artistic, and applied contexts.

Through all of these experiences the Educational Theatre program at NYU Steinhardt strives to develop the artist who is a teacher, and the teacher who is an artist. Our alumni embody that ethos, and have gone on to make incredible strides in the field, including:

• Launching the University of Denver Prison Arts Initiative, a program that brings arts-based education, and therapeutic programming into all Colorado state prisons – only the second program of this scale in the country – and bringing to life a podcast about inmates’ experiences in the prison system (Ashley Hamilton, MA & PhD alum)

• Becoming president and CEO of the New 42nd Street, a highly regarded organization that provides family programming, rehearsal space for major Broadway and off-Broadway productions, and a launching pad for new artists (Russell Granet, MA alum)

• Chairing the Speech, Communications, and Theatre Arts department of the Borough of Manhattan Community College, while continuing to work as an actor, director, and artistic director for projects that interrogate socio-political issues (Karl O’Brian Williams, MA alum)

We hope that this informative handbook helps you as you embark on this adventure with us at NYU Steinhardt!

Joe Salvatore

Program Director, NYU Steinhardt, Program in Educational Theatre