Academics

Why Study Theatre & Dance at UR?

The Department of Theatre & Dance provides a unique liberal arts experience where students thrive by engaging across difference and critically investigating the world through creative processes. 

The Department of Theatre & Dance is committed to diversity, inclusion, equity, and social justice. These values are central to the Department’s curriculum, scholarship, teaching, art-making practices and programming. Each student will engage with these values through curricular, intellectual, artistic and personal endeavors. We commit to: finding strength in our diversity, cultivating multiple perspectives, eliminating barriers to participation in the field, and fostering social justice. We uphold these values in our classes, rehearsals, play selections, casting, and our collaborative artistic processes. We continuously build more inclusive and equitable theatre and dance by foregrounding marginalized peoples and histories in our planning and policy decisions. We value creative engagement at the crossroads of theatre, dance and social justice; traditional and non-traditional theatre and dance making practices both on and offstage.

As artist-scholars from very different disciplines, we engage with students in solving complex problems through high-impact learning experiences that develop critical thinking, an appreciation for complexity and context, and the ability to communicate clearly in a variety of languages (verbal, visual, aural, spatial, behavioral, kinesthetic). While many of our students go on to pursue a life in the performing arts, our fundamental mission is for all our students to develop as well-rounded individuals with a broad spectrum of knowledge and skills in order to think and act creatively in an ever-changing and increasingly challenging local and global reality.