Degree Programs in Theater & Performance Studies

Major in Theater & Performance Studies

A major in Theater & Performance Studies consists of courses that combine critical and creative inquiry and is designed for students interested in not only developing skills in theater and performance but in an interdisciplinary exploration of how these art forms matter in the world. This distinctive degree program engages with theater and performance as it intersects with social justice, cultural politics, criticism, American and world cultures, arts management, education, and more. The TPST Program offers studio/seminar courses in acting, directing, playwriting, design, technical theatre, and stage management, as well as coursework and production opportunities that emphasize adaptation and performance; devising and developing new work; cross-cultural performance and world theatre history; performance and politics; community- based performance; arts management; ensemble techniques; musical and cabaret performance; interdisciplinary learning about culture, race, gender, and identity; and a variety of special topics that offer diverse opportunities for undergraduate research.  Requirements for the degree include a total of 32 credit hours as follows:

Academic Requirements for the Major

32 credit hours: 10 courses, three practicums, two colloquia

• At least 2 out of 3 Fundamental Methods Courses: Play Analysis (TPST-1300); Acting 1 (TPST-1200); Adaptation and Performance (TPST-2000)
• At Least 1 core topics seminar for breadth: Cross-Cultural Performance Studies (TPST-1050); or World Theater Histories (TPST-2400); or Global Performance 
• One one-credit Performing Arts Colloquia
• At least 15 additional elective credits within TPST including:
  • One Design Or Technical Theater class  
  • Three intermediate or advanced 3-credit electives (2020 or higher), one of which may include a performance lab
• One focus seminar, studio course or 3-credit performance lab  
• Three one-credit production practicums (technical theater, costume shop, run crew, etc.), counting as a 3-credit course
• One-credit Majors Colloquium in senior spring (TPST-4960)

NB: For graduates in 2027 and beyond, two one-credit performing arts colloquia will be required

Studying Theater & Performance Studies at Georgetown

Interdisciplinary Study and Practice: Our distinctive, nationally-recognized program builds upon students’ diverse pre-college creative experiences—whether as artists, audiences, or activists, and whether performer-based, design-centered, technically-centered, overlapping with film and new media, activist, or culturally-grounded. We combine students’ creative strengths and cultural proficiencies with their interdisciplinary interests to deepen understanding of theater and performance’s multifaceted role/s and potential in society. The degree encourages an exploration of creative collaboration and experimentation in styles, practices and scholarly methods to grow understanding of how performance moves and matters across cultural, global, political, artistic, humanistic, historical, and geographic boundaries. As students move across our distinctive fusion of studio courses, experiential learning labs, and small seminars, grounded in liberal arts learning, they cultivate an expansive understanding of performance—and the world— as well as texts and contexts, scaffolded by reflective engagement and art-making. The curriculum integrates critical inquiry, creativity and social justice, repeatedly, which stirs whole-person learning and student engagement, as well as interdisciplinary rigor.

The Curriculum: The Theater & Performance Studies major is flexible by design, piquing and channeling students’ interests beyond the theater while stirring experimentation and purpose in and through the arts. More than most programs, we avoid tracks, while engaging students in disparate methods and projects that enable their growth and ability to forge original pathways in the world. Students are mentored by faculty with markedly different relationships to the field and collaborate —to a rare extent — with faculty, guest artists, each other, alumni, and staff. As students move through foundational courses to advanced electives and from studios to their independent projects (sometimes artistic, sometimes community-based, sometimes scholarly) they pursue original research, seamlessly moving across sites and learning modes. For many students, work on honors thesis projects, apprenticeships in the field, and immersive learning in workshops or labs tied to our home season, provide culminating experiences that shape their lives at and beyond Georgetown. 

Methods: Collaboration, like writing and reflection, is integrated across the curriculum, variously. The TPST major also emphasizes praxis—the mix of theory and practice—which when combined with experimental labs and design thinking grows inventive students and courageous creatives, even, multi-hyphenates. While all students engage across the continuum of Theater and Performance Studies—opening to a more inclusive vision for theater’s possibilities in society, some students lean into Performance Studies, which deploys performance as a method to investigate and/or remap subjects, connecting vectors such as performance, gender and race, or performance and politics. (Some students intern with the Woodshed, affiliated with the Racial Justice Institute; others with the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics; all students engage with the TPST Home Season.) Embodied learning and intersectional knowledge is valued and grown in the TPST major, so that all students learn to engage with their “whole selves”— intellects, imagination, bodies, emotions —as they engage with diverse subjects, fostering Ignatian learning and a heightened respect for community-in-diversity. At Georgetown, the study of theater is inherently interdisciplinary—considering subjects from disparate disciplines—and multimodal.

Making Work: Our Labs and Technologies: The TPST Home Season provides a lab for research and learning, and the Davis Center has an array of smaller studio spaces—rehearsal rooms, costume and scenic shops, design studio—where students can work on class projects or directly with faculty and staff. Theater practicums in the Devine and Gonda Theatres, as well as costume and scenic shops,  provide experiential entrees to working with material cultures and technologies, mentored by faculty and staff, while cultivating respect for the collaborative nature of this field and learning; practicums  also provide lenses on the inherent labor and environmental issues facing the field, and create access to skills necessary for growing, or experimenting in, technical theater, just as performance labs provide skills helpful for those considering working in stage or film as collaborating artists.  While many of our classes foreground live presence and embodiment as primary instruments, which can ally with building mental health in an increasingly distracted world, other TPST classes invite students to experiment with theatrical, film, and/or new media technologies, an essential aspect of engaging the world and array of career paths this major makes possible. The Davis Center, Georgetown’s first building designed for arts education, is in the heart of campus, scaled to student learning and serving as a laboratory for faculty and student research, as well as public engagement for—and through— the Performing Arts’ multidisciplinary department.

Engaging Washington, DC: Georgetown’s location in the nation’s capitol offers unique advantages, connecting students with an extraordinary range of theater, performance, and cultural initiatives that engage ideas and collectives through performance, festivals and public rituals. The larger DC area has over 100 theatres and is known for its “fringe festival” as much as its major regional non-profit theatres, such as The Shakespeare Theatre, Signature Theatre (“musicals only”) or Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater. For those who study TPST, the DC area is equally exciting for its global performances—such as major festivals hosted at the Kennedy Center, edgier guest artists hosted at Georgetown or dozens of culturally-specific performances at Embassies, or on the National Mall during the Folklife Festival—as it is for the city’s array of small-yet-mighty theatres (e.g. Mosaic Theatre’s multiracial new works, or Spooky Action’s “experimental plays,” or Gala Hispanic Theatre, or Young Playwrights Theatre). TPST has partnered with all of these organizations—and more—at some juncture in the last decade.These connections not only enhance classroom learning and a larger field-trip or two for all in the major each semester, but also provide opportunities for valuable internship experiences.

World-Class Faculty: Our TPST Faculty are internationally recognized for their artistic achievement, their scholarship and their public engagement as scholars and leaders. (Most have won an array of awards and grants from within and beyond the academy for their excellence as artists, scholars, and leaders, with areas of expertise including creative research, human rights, and pedagogy that engages diversity and well-being.) Our TPST Faculty have been published by premier academic presses and leading, as well as experimental, academic and arts journals. They are recognized as playwrights, directors, scholars, experimental film and theater-makers, curators, and artist-scholars. All of our tenure-line faculty have won Teaching Awards or Fellowships within the College; most have won significant Grants and Fellowships from national or international organizations, such as the Belasco, the NEH, the Doris Duke Foundation, and many others, tied to book production, global festivals, innovations in technology, and racial and gender justice, for instance. Students are advised by faculty and staff with markedly different relationships to the field and world and are invited to collaborate—on international projects, on research projects ranging from play-making to experimental ethnography to justice-and-activism with advisors, guest artists, each other and alumni.

Academic Requirements for the Minor

20 credit hours

• 1 of 3 Core Methods classes: Play Analysis (TPST-1300); Acting (TPST-1200); Adaptation and Performance (TPST-2000)
• At Least 1 of 3 “Breadth” classes: Cross-Cultural Performance Studies (TPST-1050) or World Theater Histories (TPST-2400) or Global Performance
• One one-credit TPST 1000 Production Practicum
• One one-credit Performing Arts Colloquia
• At least 10 additional elective credit hours within TPST including at least two three-credit courses 2020 or higher

REVISED August 2024.

Integrated Writing Requirement

The Theater & Performance Studies major integrates creative and critical inquiry. Writing presents a core pathway for that integration, fostering students’ cultural and professional development. Creative thinking and writing involve the imaginative generation of new ideas, artworks, and performances through the study of creative practices and methods (including, for instance, playwriting, performance, design, and direction). Critical writing and thinking require analytic and reflective engagement with theatrical texts, processes, histories, methodologies, and creative works. Writing specifically to the TPST major manifests variously, for instance as playwriting, adaptation, curatorial notes, critical essays, artist manifestos, grants, and performative scholarship; advanced students may apply to pursue an honors thesis project that can manifest as a creative research project, a more traditional scholarly thesis, or a community-based research project.

Our majors and minors learn interdisciplinary thinking via writing, bringing seemingly disparate bodies of knowledge to bear when problem-solving which will prepare them not only for careers in the arts, but also for work in education, legal fields, public service, consulting, media, and politics.

Our students engage in many writing modalities across the major, including academic, creative, informal, and editorial. In both studio and seminar settings, our writing curriculum prepares students to craft creative solutions to problems —whether social, theoretical, artistic, or historical—based on careful study, research, and analysis. Virtually all courses incorporate formal and informal writing to cross-fertilize critical and creative inquiry, cultivate each writer’s fluency, and foster collaborative learning. Majors will experience three phases of engagement with writing across their degree to ensure an integrated, iterative experience of writing, regardless of their trajectories:

• Phase One is fulfilled by taking our gateway courses of TPST 1300 (Play Analysis) and TPST 2000 (Adaptation and Performance), at least one of which must be completed by the spring semester, junior year. These gateway courses demonstrate the integration of writing into the curriculum, laying the groundwork for majors’ and minors’ cross-fertilization of critical and creative inquiry.
•  Phase Two may be fulfilled by several elective intermediate and/or advanced courses that assure research and revision for writing projects. Exemplary courses include Writing Stage Adaptations, Performing Black Citizenship, and Thesis Projects, among others.
• Phase Three: As of Spring 2017, all majors will submit a portfolio at the end of their trajectories which highlights their work across the major (and their own areas of specialty, whether design or dramaturgy, scholarship or playwriting, direction or performance). This final portfolio will be due in the Major’s Colloquium via a protected word press and can serve as an excellent calling card for their entry into the field, as well as an archive of their work in this often ephemeral field.

Courses

Theater & Performance Studies courses intertwine creative and critical inquiry. In addition to popular studio courses in Acting and Adaptation and Performance, we also offer “makers lab” practicums in Technical Theater and signature courses that fuse the style of embodied studios and interdisciplinary seminars. Almost one-half of our classes offered are cross-listed with other programs, including Black Studies, Culture and Politics (SFS), Disability Studies, and English as well as American Studies, the Center for Social Justice, Comparative Literature, Public Speaking, and Women’s and Gender Studies.  Many of our courses fulfill Gen Ed requirements, whether for HALC (Humanities: Arts, Literatures and Cultures) or the Diversity (domestic and global) distribution requirements.

• Production Practicum (TPST 1000)
• Costume Shop Practicum (TPST 1000)
• Performing Arts Colloquium (TPST 1099)
• Acting I (TPST 1200)
• Play Analysis (TPST 1300)
• Performance Lab (TPST 1901)
• Performance Lab (TPST 1903)
• Adaptation & Performance (TPST 2000)
• Acting II (TPST 2200)
• Storytelling: Voice & Body (TPST 2265)
• Sustainable Fashion & Costume (TPST 2290)
• Contemporary Feminist Play/s (TPST 3320)
• Performance Lab (TPST 3905) 
• Theatrical Ensemble: Res/Perf (TPST 4000)
• Staying Cool: Race & Femininity (TPST 4151)

Prospective Students

The major in Theater & Performance Studies (TPST) offers a distinctive integration of creative and interdisciplinary study, while fostering whole person growth within Georgetown’s esteemed liberal arts tradition. Students explore art-making, American and global cultures and trans/formations of history, self and community by studying theater and its roles, contexts and arts (acting, playwriting, directing, design, movement, spoken word). Beyond studying plays and theatrical practices with world-class faculty and guest artists, students engage performance studies and adaptation as modes and methods of analysis, activism and play, studying everything from social change and cross-cultural studies to experimental ethnography to design thinking, always underpinned by robust creative inquiry and experiences. To a rare degree, students who major in TPST learn to collaborate and work across contexts, buoyed by the extraordinary opportunities presented in our labs, in Washington DC, and even abroad.

“The fusion of critical and creative inquiry is the perfect summation! Collaboration was everywhere, and I learned a dedication to excellence and quality.”

Elise Lemle (TPST and ENGL, ‘11), STEAM & Jewelry Designer, Project Lead for GOOGLE, Storytelling + Design + Technology + Play.

“TPST gave me the opportunity to build relationships with some of the most amazing contributors to DC’s Theater community. To this day, my professors and peers have been resources for my own professional development.”

Jordanna Hernandez (TPST ‘15), Actor, Writer, Chicana.

“I didn’t come to school looking for theatrical training. The TPST program discovered me, in a way, and I was totally swept up. It truly was home for me at Georgetown…The TPST program taught me incredibly valuable life lessons… time management, the ability to collaborate deeply with all kinds of people, public speaking skills, creative thinking, and a degree of natural improvisation that … is a great primer for real-world work environments.”

Chase Meachum (TPST and ENG ‘14), Digital Media + Marketing, Apple Music. Founding Member, Subscriber Hub.

“Not only did I meet welcoming and talented students who were passionately committed to the arts, but also professors who were tremendously knowledgeable, seasoned in the professional world, and inspiring to all students—pushing them, or us, to think critically about art’s relationship to humanity/politics and to follow our own creative instincts.”

Camila Madero (TPST and ENG ‘23), Theater-Maker, Writer, Illustrator.

See individual stories from alumni that embody our “Whole Person” approach to education and life.

Theater & Performance Studies Season

Join the Davis Performing Arts Center at Georgetown University for our 2024-25 Season of Radical Care. This year, we focus on incubation, creative pedagogy, and artistic process, highlighting works in progress rather than full productions. With an emphasis on the student experience, we return to the roots of performing arts through collaborative workshops, intimate readings, and launching our new Performing Arts Colloquium. Amidst the instability and fluctuation of the university, continued austerity, and the lingering impact of the pandemic on artists, we embrace a year of introspection, planning, and radical community care, allowing ourselves to grow our own systems of support and healing. Let’s nurture our creativity and care for one another as we envision a bright, equitable future in the performing arts.

Find an archive of past Theater and Performance Studies Seasons here.