Recent News

The 2021 Austin Latinx New Play Festival, presented by Teatro Vivo and ScriptWorks, celebrates all-new works of theatre written, directed and workshopped by Latinx artists, many of whom come from our UT Theatre and Dance community. This year's virtual presentation will take place May 13-15, 2021.

Faculty members Erica Gionfriddo and J.E. Johnson were among eight faculty members from the College of Fine Arts to receive COVID Transformational Online Instruction Contributions Awards, a recently established award presented by the Provost's Office to acknowledge faculty and staff who created innovative pedagogical resources and programs when transferring their classes into an online setting.

The Ethnic and Third World Literatures Review of Books, “Everyday Anarchy”: Communities in Action during a Pandemic of Unrest includes reviews written by current students Zachariah Ezer and kt shorb, as well as a review of faculty member Lisa B. Thompson's Underground, Monroe, and The Mamalogues by alum I.B. Hopkins (M.F.A. 2020).

Despite the landscape of educational theatre shifting before them in spring of 2020, recent UTeach Theatre graduates celebrated a 100% job placement rate for those applying at Texas schools. Alumni Miranda Perkins and Tori Husting discuss their first semester of teaching in this new educational landscape and their advice for future teachers stepping into these roles.

Playwright Hee-won Kim, director Mike Steele and co-environmental designers Ningmo Liu and Mingxiang Ya discuss the major components of OCD as well as the challenges (and benefits) of creating a world that is at once virtual, performed and animated.

In the wake of the pandemic, faculty member and Harry Ransom Center curator Eric Colleary has started the "Theatre 2020 Project," a digital time capsule documenting the theatrical shutdown of 2020. In an article for Playbill, Felicia Fitzpatrick (B.A. 2014) writes about his growing archive, which will be made available to view at the Harry Ransom Center.

As a writer in the Lincoln Center Theater's Beaumont New Play Commission Program, faculty member Branden Jacobs-Jenkins was invited to select a piece as part of the upcoming Spotlight Series, selecting The Forbidden City by Bill Gunn to be part of a series of audio features of past works presented at LCT. An interview with Jacobs-Jenkins and director Seret Scott is available, along with the audio-play, until May 23, 2021.

Faculty members Erica Gionfriddo and Adriana Serrano fostered cross-disciplinary collaboration in a recent project between Gionfriddo's choreography course and Serrano's production design course through the Department of Radio-Television-Film.

Ground Floor Theatre's upcoming season includes rain falls special on me by Lane Michael Stanley (M.F.A. 2020); Memphis, directed by Matrex Kilgore (B.A. 2015); Dot, directed by faculty member Lisa B. Thompson and "En el nombre del padre," a digital performance art piece by artist in residence siri gurudev (Ph.D. candidate).

This fall, the College of Fine Arts welcomes Joel Valentín-Martínez to the Dance division as an associate professor with tenure in the Department of Theatre and Dance at The University of Texas at Austin. A former member of the Tony Award-winning Garth Fagan Dance company, Valentín-Martínez has spent the last two decades developing his own choreographic works and teaching at the university level, most recently at Northwestern University.