Recent News

Faculty member Branden Jacobs-Jenkins will write co-executive produce and write the pilot for an upcoming adaptation of Octavia E. Butler's influential novel Kindred for FX. 

Faculty member Roxanne Schroeder-Arce is hosting LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections' 19th annual ¡A Viva Voz! Celebration of Latina/o Arts and Culture, featuring JoAnn and Rupert Reyes, founders of Teatro Vivo. This free, virtual event will take place on April 1, 2021 at 7:00 p.m.

In a recent article by The Austin Chronicle, choreographer and faculty member Gesel Mason shared more about the process of creating burst! with the goal of giving her students an outlet to wrestle with their current world and past experiences.

Gesel Mason discusses the process of transferring what she calls a “methodology of undoing” to a group of UT students for burst!, a piece that has grown into a process of discovery and observation; of holding space and acknowledging the messiness of our current moment.

Faculty member James Glavan and co-author Beverly Gore Norcross were selected as winners of the 2021 Oscar G. Brockett Golden Pen Award for their book Stage Makeup 11th Edition. This award, sponsored by USITT and our very own Oscar G. Brockett Center for Theatre History and Criticism, honors an outstanding publication surrounding the topics of theatrical design or production.

Andrew G. Rodriguez (B.F.A. 2019) joins three other Latinx artists in a panel discussion about art, life and the complexities of both race and ethnicity within the Latinx community. Their conversation, hosted by New York Theatre Workshop, will be streamed on February 24, 2021.

Third-year M.F.A. in Design and Technology candidate Annie Ulrich has received the 2021 Barbara Matera Award for Costume Making. This award, selected by USITT from a pool of applicants across the nation, recognizes Ulrich's outstanding artistic and technical skills as a costume maker. 

UT Theatre and Dance alumnus Dr. Ramón H. Rivera-Servera (Ph.D. 2003) will return to the 40-acres as the next dean of the College of Fine Arts, bringing with him a passion for advancing transformational change in the arts. His appointment will begin on July 1, 2021.

Faculty member Karen Maness has curated a collection of 12 of the 50 historic Hollywood backdrops that are currently stored at Texas Performing Arts, showcasing a portion of what Maness notes to be "the largest educational collection of Hollywood Motion Picture backdrops in the world." The exhibit will be open to the public from February 11 to March 21, 2021.

In December, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded just under $100,000 for a project spearheaded by University of Texas at Austin Associate Professor of Dance Gesel Mason to support her ongoing project to archive the work of Black choreographers.