Recent News

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.

Artistic collaborators Michael J. Love (M.F.A. 2020) and Art and Art History alum Ariel René Jackson were recently selected as recipients of the annual Tito's Prize out of a pool of over 150 local artists, providing them with funding and an opportunity to perform their project "We are the [Hackers], Baby, [Hackers] are we" at Big Medium in Austin later this year. 

Alumna Kimberly Belflower (M.F.A. 2017) recently wrote the script for "Marin's Dream," a seven-music video created by Beach House in collaboration with Meow Wolf for Omega Mart, an immersive installation in Las Vegas that features hundreds of unique works of art.

M.F.A. in Live Design candidate Michael Bruner and current UT Austin student Samara Zuckerbrod discuss building a space for connection and reflection on climate change and our environmental impacts through the Creek Monster Habitat, an art installation created by multiple UT community members in and beyond the Department of Theatre and Dance.

For a recent acting project entitled "Classical Vlogues," faculty member Jeremy Lee Cudd worked with five undergraduate students to re-imagine Shakespearean monologues as intimate, site-specific solos. Their performances are available online, workshopped and completed through multiple Zoom rehearsals leading up to safe, socially distanced filming sessions.