Theatre Arts

The Department of Theatre Arts is dedicated to nurturing New Paltz students' creative identity, artistic compasses, and inner artists/scholars through a dynamic, experiential, and diverse educational environment. The program aims to foster a deeper understanding of the human condition, cultivate empathy, and explore ensemble building through the department's curriculum, creative programming, and local/regional engagement. We offer students a unique, welcoming community that focuses on the power of collaboration while leaving space for the enrichment of the individual to risk boldly. Our faculty of educators, mentors,artists, and scholars provide students with models of excellence in our classrooms, studios, shops, on our stages, in major theatre centers in the United States, and in the global community.

For Theatre Arts majors, we offer a Bachelor of Arts degree grounded in history, literature, theory, and applied contemporary practices of theatre, giving relevance, context, and a wide array of perspectives and possibilities to a student's artistic endeavors. General education students and minors experience Theatre Arts as a multidisciplinary tradition embedded into a global, historical and cultural landscape.

Student Learning Outcomes

By the time they graduate, Theatre Majors will:
  1. Articulate self-reflection and respond as a member of the local community and global society; to continually evaluate and motivate one's actions—connecting work as artists and as global citizens to sustainability in all of its forms - social, environmental and economic.
  2. Develop the ability to articulate the importance of storytelling to the ​arts, ​humanities, broader social development​, and evolution of society through​/by ​connecting interdisciplinary studies from General Education and Minor courses to their work as Theatre Artists
  3. Demonstrate (in written, visual, aural and oral forms) an understanding of a play, musical, live performance or production in terms of its (local, national, global) social, political, cultural, aesthetic and historical context
  4. Evaluate a theatrical work for its context and clearly articulate an understanding of that work through a discipline specific interpretation or response—applying theatre practices and developing various techniques, skills and methods for creating works of live performance.

Want to help Theatre Arts make a difference?

Your generous contributions support Department of Theatre Arts programs, projects and student scholarships. Consider joining Friends of Theatre, or make a recurring or one-time donation via the form below.