Recent News

Theatre and Dance faculty member Lisa B. Thompson was recently featured in Austin360 for her upcoming work Single Black Female, on stage this month at Ground Floor Theatre (Austin, Texas), as well as her contributions to the American stage and her work as an educator.

Alumnus Isaac Gómez's (B.A. 2013) new play I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter is currently preparing for its world premiere at Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago. With featured ensemble member and alumna Karen Rodriguez, this poignant adaptation of Erika L. Sánchez's award-winning novel follows Julia, a Chicago high school student as she navigates trials and tribulations of following her dreams of becoming a writer. 

Single Black Female, written by faculty memberLisa B. Thompson and directed by alumnus Matrex Kilgore (B.A. 2015), takes the stage at Ground Floor Theatre this spring with a two-woman show featuring rapid-fire comic vignettes that explore the lives of thirty-something African American middle-class women in urban America as they search for love, clothes and dignity in a world that fails to recognize them amongst a parade of stereotypical images. 

Playwriting faculty member Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Associate Professor of Practice) was recently named one of the recipients of the USA Fellowship from United States Artists. This $50,000 fellowship is granted to a selected number of artists in recognition of their contributions to the field. His plays include Everybody, An Octoroon and Appropriate.

Don Quixote, the literary creation of seventeenth-century Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes, is an indefatigable character with a big imagination, one wild enough to make giants out of windmills and castles out of roadside inns. He's now been re-imagined in El Paso-born playwright Octavio Solis’s new play, Quixote Nuevo, which opens at Houston’s Alley Theatre on January 17. Texas Monthly spoke with Octavis Solis and the play’s director, Texas Theatre and Dance Faculty member KJ Sanchez, about the prescient project.

This spring, the College of Fine Arts welcomes Leah Cox to the Dance division as an associate professor with tenure in the Department of Theatre and Dance at The University of Texas at Austin. With her history as a dancer with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company and her most recent roles as dean of the American Dance Festival and associate professor of Dance at Bard College, Cox brings a wealth of experience to her new position. 

Teatro Vivo has recently announced the 2020 Austin Latinx New Play Festival presented in collaboration with ScriptWorks, to run May 14-16, 2020. Alumni Jaymes Sanchez (The Cucuy Will Find You) and lily gonzales (trans(formada)) will both have thier works featured.

On stage now in Boston at Huntington Theatre Company, Quixote Nuevo retells one of literature's most vibrant and memorable characters. Directed by faculty member KJ Sanchez with voice and dialect coaching by interim chair Robert Ramirez, this piece transports audiences to a border town in Texas, where the eccentric, brilliant knight Cervantes embarks on a cross-desert quest to reunite with a long-lost love.