Graduates

Our graduate programs are committed to Performance as Research as integral to the study of the history, theory, and practice of theatre and performance from around the world. We approach performance simultaneously as an object of study, a way of knowing, and a methodological tool, and are invested in the ways in which it can help us better understand—and challenge—the complicated legacies of our own academic disciplines and artistic practices. 

Program Overview

Our courses place dramatic texts, performance traditions, and applied performance from throughout history in conversation with contemporary performance. We ask: How might this performance work today? What challenges does it present to the contemporary scholar, maker, or facilitator? What role do gender, race, and/or coloniality play in this work? Why is it relevant today? We encourage our graduate students to engage in the practice of theatre and performance, broadly construed.

Involvement Opportunities

  • Our : students can apply to serve as directors, assistant directors, designers, choreographers, and dramaturgs
  • : our department shares a close relationship with CSF and many of our students have worked with this  professional theatre company as actors, interns, dramaturgs, and technical staff
  • Performers Without Borders: a student group dedicated to using performance to illuminate social issues and ignite positive social change in which students working on applied theatre and theatre for social change can participate
  • : a departmentally-produced journal dedicated to exploring the theory and application of performance in practice

Degrees Offered

*Please note, the PhD program will not be accepting any students in 2024, but we look forward to accepting applications again in 2025. We are still enthusiastically accepting MA and MA/MBA program in 2024. 

Department of Theatre & Dance Graduate Programs Diversity Statement

We are proud to embrace and innovate the ongoing decolonization of our field in all of our teaching, research and creative work. We acknowledge the historical harm that has been done by centuries of colonialism, slavery, and imperialism, and that academia has both reflected and been a participant in this effort. The Dance faculty in our department began the process of reparative justice in the 1990's, as we decided that our mostly homogenized demographics did not have to dictate our ideologies and practices. The Department of Theatre & Dance has since continued to work towards building an inclusive world through our teaching, research, and creative work, instead of waiting for a diverse student body to show up.

Therefore, our aim has been, and continues to be, a more representative, humane and accurate truth of human experience in the arts, informed and imaginative spaces for visioning, nourishing work environments for research and creativity, and brave analysis of the insidious ways racism, genocide, discrimination and bias have marred our fields of study and our communities.
 

We honor a global diversity of ways of making and of knowing. European colonialism and US Imperialism have long worked to diminish and eliminate knowledge that differed from a European worldview. As a US-based institution, we recognize that the only way we can truly see beyond the limitations of our own perspectives is to listen and learn from people with experiences that are different from our own throughout the world. Our diversity efforts are therefore grounded on establishing long-lasting relationships with scholars and artists who have worked and continue to work outside of the United States, and to attract graduate students that can help us continue to learn from these perspectives.

Performance arts at CU Boulder embraces many conventional and emerging modalities of presentation: proscenium stages, film, devised work, online social platforms, digital arenas, interactive installations, community collaboration, process-based work, performance activism that is both affective and effective, and new creations of bold imaginarians.

We embrace broad and inclusive practices in our approach to admissions:

  • CU Boulder THDN does not require the standardized Graduate Record Exam (GRE) scores for its graduate applications. Studies have shown that the GRE is a poor tool at selecting the most capable students, and that it severely restricts the entrance of minority students into graduate school. Instead, we argue that the consistency of students' records stands as a valid marker of their personal excellence. All of our graduate programs rank experiential learning and professional experience equally with academic preparation
  • CU Boulder THDN welcomes students of all cultural disciplines, bodily presentations and abilities, and identities with supportive mentorship and customized graduate learning curriculum
  • Dance does not enforce a specific dress code for instructional classes beyond guidelines for safety and non-harm
  • We deeply believe in the power of generous, non-hierarchical mentorship and collaboration amongst all community members regardless of title, position, life experience, and identity markers

We stand as active agents of transformation in education, and invite you to join us in revisioning our emerging global citizenship through the arts. 

The Department of Theatre & Dance acknowledges that the University sits upon land within the territories of the Ute, Cheyenne, and Arapaho peoples and are grateful to have the opportunity to be here. Further, we acknowledge the 48 contemporary tribal nations that are historically tied to lands that make up Colorado. We recognize and pay our respects to these Indigenous Peoples as traditional stewards of this land and the enduring relationship that exists between Indigenous Peoples and their traditional territories. We pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, relations past, present and emerging.
Graduate Student Resources
Studio Reservation Instructions
Exit Interview Questions for Graduating Students