2023 Award Recipient

Catherine Moore
Teaching Professor, School of Drama
College of Fine Arts

Catherine Moore has been on the faculty of the School of Drama since 2000 and served as Area Chair for Acting and Music Theater from 2018-2022. She specializes in physical approaches to actor training in her movement courses for undergraduate acting and music theater students. 

Dedicated to the creation of new work, Professor Moore has been the co-faculty advisor for the annual School of Drama’s PLAYGROUND: A Festival of Independent Student Work since its inception in 2003. This School-wide festival provides undergraduate and graduate students with the opportunity to explore and develop their unique artistic voices and collaborate with other student-artists in the creation of new work that expresses their diverse perspectives and passions. She has also taught acting, scene-to-song and directed multiple Junior Performance Projects. 

Professor Moore has served as fight director or movement coach for over 80 productions in the School of Drama and participates in the auditioning of incoming undergraduate performance majors. For many years she helped to produce the School of Drama’s Showcase of New Talent, which provides graduating acting and music theater majors the opportunity to perform for industry professionals in New York and Los Angeles and develop connections with established alumni. Internationally, Professor Moore has taught movement workshops at the New National Theatre of Tokyo Drama Studio, Il Melograno Scuola di Recitazione in Rome, Italy, was a founding faculty member for the More Than Movement Dance Symposium in Den Haag, The Netherlands and has shared The Viewpoints method of actor training multiple years at the Meeting of European Theatre Academies in Florence, Italy.

As an actor, she has performed in both plays and musicals in regional theaters across the United States and appeared in the acclaimed Pittsburgh Irish and Classical Theatre’s production of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer which toured in venues across the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Her fight direction has been seen at various theater companies in Pittsburgh, at The Pittsburgh Opera and the Cleveland Playhouse.

Commissioned by numerous symphony orchestras to create narrations for orchestral concerts, she collaborated with CMU alumnus and music director of the Boston Pops, Keith Lockhart on Romeo and Juliet: Shakespeare in Words and Music, and Women Composers, which has been performed by the Chicago, Boston, and Cincinnati Symphony Orchestras. She created narrations for Young People’s Concerts for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with Maestro Yaron Traub and a narration based on the letters of Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann for Music Director Pinchas Zukerman and the Orchestra du Centre National des Arts, Ottawa, Canada.

Professor Moore received her BFA in acting, magna cuml aude, from Wright State University and her MFA in dramatic performance from the University of Cincinnati, College-Conservatory of Music where she was honored in 2008 with the Julia Winter Cohen Alumni Award for Career Excellence. Dedicated to community service, she was the 2016 recipient of the Eli Rabin Memorial Award by UPMC for her volunteer work with terminally ill patients in the No One Dies Alone program.

Learn more about Professor Moore