Our future as an innovative country depends on ensuring that everyone has access to the arts.
—Michelle Obama
In the School of Drama at Carnegie Mellon University, we are producing leaders in the profession who influence how people experience the world.
Since 1914, the School of Drama at Carnegie Mellon University has offered a rich education to theatre artists: a rigorous conservatory training in all areas of theatre practice integrated into the broader intellectual context of a major research university. This conservatory within-a-university is a unique experience, and one that prepares students intellectually, artistically, and practically to be leaders in their profession, whether on the stage, in film, television, or new media. Our alumni include household names in the theatre profession and entertainment industry who are actors, directors, production designers, skilled technicians, and creative visionaries.
The school has produced countless celebrities including Ted Danson, Rob Marshall, Patrick Wilson, Cherry Jones, Sutton Foster, Holly Hunter, Steven Bochco, Bud Yorkin, and many others. Our alumni have won Academy Awards® and Tony Awards® for their innovative work in set, costume and lighting design as well as in acting, directing and producing. Notable design graduates include Academy Award-winning costume designer Ann Roth and fabled Broadway lighting designer Jules Fischer.
“I really do owe everything to Carnegie Mellon,” remarked Ted Danson on the School's collaborative culture that promotes both creativity and intellectual curiosity. “It set the tone for my life. I love the process, and I learned to love the process here.”
Young artists are challenged daily in a school committed to ongoing progressive engagement with all forms of theatre. We seek to inspire students to create signature work in their chosen area of endeavor and to celebrate unique voices from diverse cultures. Our aim is to foster curiosity about the fusion between other art forms and current theatre practice, including exploring the storytelling potential of the new technologies. The newly established International Artists Residency Program allows students an immersion experience through which they envision new possibilities for distinctive artistic expression. This summons in them previously untapped creativity and accomplishment.
What our 200 undergraduate students and 40 graduate students experience in the School of Drama is theatre that is constantly connected to a changing world. Theatre as an art form has never been more influenced by technology, by economics, and by larger cultural developments. In growing as artists, dramats must genuinely engage with compelling ideas about society, science, history, and culture, from varied perspectives and the education they receive here allows them to do that.
Theatre is a highly collaborative art and this is a highly collaborative campus. Our students know how to bring their creative skills as performers or technicians to plays or operas. But they also get a chance to work with visual artists and composers; they design dialogue for robots at the Robotics Institute; they learn to market productions with students from the business school, and they see first-hand issues in the entertainment industry with students from the Heinz School.
We encourage students and faculty to make connections off campus, both in the Pittsburgh region and around the world. Working with faculty mentors and visiting artists, the students can develop a personal connection with various theatrical traditions. Our superb facility at the Purnell Center for the Arts is at the physical center of campus, and our students take part in more than a dozen productions each semester that are highly visible to the entire community.
For the student interested in a rewarding career as a drama professional, the school offers four degree programs for undergraduate students:
Our programs for graduate students offer a more in-depth focus in specialized professional fields. These programs include:
Many individual research projects occur in the School of Drama, in the form of collaborations between faculty and students or faculty among colleges. There are also centers affiliated with the school devoted to interdisciplinary artistic research.
Center for the Arts in Society— dedicated to energizing research and teaching that links the College of Humanities and Social Sciences with the College of Fine Arts. Various members of the School of Drama are part of the center.
STUDIO for Creative Inquiry—a branch of Carnegie Mellon founded in 1989 to support experimental and cross-disciplinary work in the arts.
Entertainment Technology Center—offers a Master’s of Entertainment Technology, a degree conferred jointly by Carnegie Mellon’s College of Fine Arts and School of Computer Science. ETC’s mission is to provide students with the opportunity to become leaders in education and research that combines technology and fine arts to create new processes, tools and vision for storytelling and entertainment.