About
MIT Theater approaches performance as a vital lens for questioning, understanding, and creatively responding to the complex forces that shape our world. We view theater as a contemporary artistic practice within a rich continuum of global performance traditions that challenges conventions, cultivates curiosity, and inspires new ways of investigating the role of live performance in a rapidly shifting world. Our courses and projects utilize innovative forms of storytelling, embodied practices, immersive strategies, and critical placemaking and placekeeping. The program invites students to engage with theater as an inherently interdisciplinary practice through its subjects, collaborations, and production opportunities that bridge artistic, scholarly, and technological inquiry. Our faculty’s research and creative work pursue transformative approaches to performance that reach stages and screens across the globe.
MIT Theater gave me the technical foundation and conceptual framework to work across performance, design, and media. That training continues to shape my practice as a spatial designer, contributing to exhibitions, installations, and performances across international institutions and New York theater.
Daniel Landez ’21
Spatial Designer and Director
Theater at MIT offers courses focused on acting, voice, directing, dramatic writing and dramaturgy, dance, movement, and choreography in addition to an array of design-based courses. Our foundational classes include Introduction to Acting (21T.101), Physical Improvisation: Bodies in Motion (21T.101), Fundamentals of Theater Design (21T.120), Performance Media (21T.130), Script Analysis (21T.131) and Playwriting Fundamentals (21T.150), additional courses offer in-depth opportunities to pursue creative and academic interests. Each fall and spring, there is at least one faculty-led Theater Arts Production class (21T.100 for theater and/or 21T.200 for dance) in which students collaborate as performers, technicians, and designers for course credit in a production at the W97 theater. Our dynamic curriculum provides students with artistic, technical, and intellectual skills along with unique opportunities to apply their knowledge in the studio, on stage, and on screen.
