About Us

Theater at Emory consists of the Department of Theater Studies, Theater Emory, and extracurricular Student Theater. Friends of Theater at Emory supports all of these.

Founded in 1982, Theater Studies and Theater Emory make up a collaborative whole. Their shared artistic faculty/staff pursue theater both as an integral part of a liberal arts education and as a site of serious inquiry.

Unlike many pre-professional conservatory programs, the Department of Theater Studies requires academically rigorous study in a wide variety of sub-disciplines of theater; our teaching happens in classrooms, in tutorial conferences, in scenic and technical shops, in rehearsal halls, in unexpected hallway conversations, and in performances. The goal is that our students will be able to think, question, and create outside the box of “acting” or “design”—to re-imagine theater rather than simply to fit themselves into existing models.

Theater Emory, as a resident professional company, serves as a laboratory for faculty artistic research as well as for Theater Studies courses (students can be involved in many capacities and auditions are open to any student). This unusual partnering of undergraduates with adventurous professional artists in residence creates distinctive opportunities: to link theory and practice; to let mature artists and gifted students inspire each other; and to make theater that asks substantial questions about the world.

Students who wish to create their own theater projects independently may work through various student theater organizations: Starving Artist Productions (SAP), which produces straight plays, Ad Hoc Productions (musicals), Rathskellar (improvisational comedy), AHANA (African-American/Hispanic/Asian/Native American) Performance Group. Alpha Psi Omega, the national theater honor fraternity, is a service organization for student theater and holds an annual festival for student-written plays, The Lenaia.

Opportunities for involvement in Theater at Emory are available through the support activities of Friends of Theater at Emory.