yale university creative writing mfa

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Careers in creative writing: the mfa question and other concerns about the writing life after yale, monday, april 9, 2018    |    5:30pm to 6:30pm.

Accomplished writers and alums discuss their craft, different careers paths in writing and publishing, and the question of the benefit and purpose of an MFA program.

Cynthia Zarin (moderator), Senior Lecturer in English, is the Coordinator of the Writing Concentration at Yale. Cynthia is the author of five books of poetry, most recently, Orbit (2017) as well as five books for children, and a collection of essays, An Enlarged Heart: A Personal History (2013). Honors and awards include the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the New York Women’s Press Award for Writing on the Arts, and a Parent’s Choice Award for Children’s Literature. She is a longtime contributor to The New Yorker, where she currently writes about books and theatre, as well as The New York Times, The Paris Review, and other publications, and a former contributing editor for Gourmet Magazine. She is Resident Writer for the New York based dance company, BalletCollective.

Paul La Farge (JE ‘92) is the author of four novels: The Artist of the Missing, Haussmann, or the Distinction, Luminous Airplanes, and The Night Ocean; and a book of imaginary dreams, The Facts of Winter. His stories and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Harper’s, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Bard Fiction Prize, and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the American Academy in Berlin. He never got an MFA, but has somehow been teaching in MFA programs for the last sixteen years.

Caitlin Macy (SY ‘92) is the author of Mrs., Spoiled, and The Fundamentals of Play. She majored in Classics at Yale before receiving her MFA from Columbia. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Slate. The recipient of an O’Henry award, she lives in New York City with her husband and two children.

Ed Park (SY ’92) is the author of the novel Personal Days, which was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and one of Time’s top 10 fiction books of the year. He is a founding editor of The Believer and was most recently executive editor at Penguin Press. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Bookforum, and many other places, and he has taught at Columbia’s MFA program and the Gallatin School at NYU. He also writes a column for the New York Times Book Review on graphic novels.

Sonya Huber’s newest book is Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System. Her other books include Opa Nobody, Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir, The Evolution of Hillary Rodham Clinton and a textbook, The Backwards Research Guide for Writers. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and many other outlets. She teaches at Fairfield University and directs Fairfield’s Low-Residency MFA Program.

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Yale Creative Writing

• English Department

Director’s Note

Our award-winning faculty is comprised of some of the most influential authors writing today. All of our instructors are also extremely dedicated teachers who work closely with students on deepening an awareness of the tradition of creative writing as well as shaping a sense of craft. We offer students a diverse range of seminars and workshops in drama, fiction, nonfiction, translation, and poetry, from the introductory level to the advanced. Courses are not limited to only English majors. Creative writing classes draw students from all over campus: from anthropologists to mathematicians to economists. 

At Yale, literature is a living art, and for that reason a great number of visiting writers come to campus every year to give readings, to conduct master classes, and to meet with students in ourseminars and workshops. Recent visitors have included John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein, Lydia Davis, Adam Gopnik, David Mitchell, Susan Orlean, Sarah Ruhl, Tracy K. Smith, Natasha Tretheway, and Chris Ware.

There is also a tremendous amount of possibilities for creative writing outside the classrooms, evident in a variety of student activities, including slam poetry competitions and student-run publications such as The Yale Literary Magazine and the Yale Daily News . And many Yale graduates have gone on to become successful journalists, poets, and novelists.

The Creative Writing Program is closely tied with other programs and  institutions on campus, such as the Yale Journalism Initiative , The Yale Review , the Beinecke Library , the Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics , and the Whitney Humanities Center , among others. These relationships provide rich opportunities for our students to become a vital presence on campus. Every year, there are departmental awards to which students can submit their work for consideration. English majors can also apply to become Concentrators so that their time at Yale culminates in a full manuscript that they develop one-on-one with a faculty member.

From the very beginning, Yale has produced writers of unquestionable talent, writers who have gone on to shape the very possibilities of literature and thought. Yet, it has always been as a human—and humanizing—concern that creative writing has brought such energy. The Yale Creative Writing Program, in various ways, gives students the tools and resources to help them become the writers they can be. 

Richard Deming Director of Creative Writing Department of English

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Graduate education.

The Yale English Department offers a broad-ranging program of graduate education, with courses that engage all periods of British literature, American literature since its inception, and many of the contemporary interdisciplines (feminism, media studies, post-colonialism, Black studies, LGBTQIA+ studies, and the environmental humanities).

The Department aims to train future scholars, writers, and teachers of many kinds: our primary focus is on the development of college and university professors, but our alumni also go on to careers as curators, librarians, secondary school teachers, university administrators, journalists, editors, and professional writers. Our faculty believe in the values of pluralism (in what is studied and how it is studied), and they are committed to preparing students to succeed in competitive and demanding professions. To that end, we make the teaching of undergraduates an important part of graduate training, as well as offering a wide array of professional development opportunities at  The Yale Review , university libraries and museums, the Digital Humanities Lab, and elsewhere on campus.

Pluralism within the Department is enhanced by relations with other graduate programs. The English Department offers combined PhD programs with African-American Studies, Film and Media Studies, History of Art, Early Modern Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and has strong affiliations with graduate programs in American Studies, Comparative Literature, Medieval Studies, Religious Studies, and other humanistic disciplines. Faculty members are often joint appointees in English and another of these programs, and many courses are cross-listed. The Department encourages its students to design programs of study that combine specialization with wise generalization.

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The 10 Best Creative Writing MFA Programs in the US

The talent is there. 

But the next generation of great American writers needs a collegial place to hone their craft. 

They need a place to explore the writer’s role in a wider community. 

They really need guidance about how and when to publish. 

All these things can be found in a solid Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing degree program. This degree offers access to mentors, to colleagues, and to a future in the writing world. 

A good MFA program gives new writers a precious few years to focus completely on their work, an ideal space away from the noise and pressure of the fast-paced modern world. 

We’ve found ten of the best ones, all of which provide the support, the creative stimulation, and the tranquility necessary to foster a mature writer.

We looked at graduate departments from all regions, public and private, all sizes, searching for the ten most inspiring Creative Writing MFA programs. 

Each of these ten institutions has assembled stellar faculties, developed student-focused paths of study, and provide robust support for writers accepted into their degree programs. 

To be considered for inclusion in this list, these MFA programs all must be fully-funded degrees, as recognized by Read The Workshop .

Creative Writing education has broadened and expanded over recent years, and no single method or plan fits for all students. 

Today, MFA programs across the country give budding short story writers and poets a variety of options for study. For future novelists, screenwriters – even viral bloggers – the search for the perfect setting for their next phase of development starts with these outstanding institutions, all of which have developed thoughtful and particular approaches to study.

So where will the next Salinger scribble his stories on the steps of the student center, or the next Angelou reading her poems in the local bookstore’s student-run poetry night? At one of these ten programs.

Here are 10 of the best creative writing MFA programs in the US.

University of Oregon (Eugene, OR)

Starting off the list is one of the oldest and most venerated Creative Writing programs in the country, the MFA at the University of Oregon. 

Longtime mentor, teacher, and award-winning poet Garrett Hongo directs the program, modeling its studio-based approach to one-on-one instruction in the English college system. 

Oregon’s MFA embraces its reputation for rigor. Besides attending workshops and tutorials, students take classes in more formal poetics and literature.  

A classic college town, Eugene provides an ideal backdrop for the writers’ community within Oregon’s MFA students and faculty.  

Tsunami Books , a local bookseller with national caché, hosts student-run readings featuring writers from the program. 

Graduates garner an impressive range of critical acclaim; Yale Younger Poet winner Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Cave Canem Prize winner and Guggenheim fellow Major Jackson, and PEN-Hemingway Award winner Chang-Rae Lee are noteworthy alumni. 

With its appealing setting and impressive reputation, Oregon’s MFA program attracts top writers as visiting faculty, including recent guests Elizabeth McCracken, David Mura, and Li-young Lee.

The individual approach defines the Oregon MFA experience; a key feature of the program’s first year is the customized reading list each MFA student creates with their faculty guide. 

Weekly meetings focus not only on the student’s writing, but also on the extended discovery of voice through directed reading. 

Accepting only ten new students a year—five in poetry and five in fiction— the University of Oregon’s MFA ensures a close-knit community with plenty of individual coaching and guidance.

Cornell University (Ithaca, NY)

Cornell University’s MFA program takes the long view on life as a writer, incorporating practical editorial training and teaching experience into its two-year program.

Incoming MFA students choose their own faculty committee of at least two faculty members, providing consistent advice as they move through a mixture of workshop and literature classes. 

Students in the program’s first year benefit from editorial training as readers and editors for Epoch , the program’s prestigious literary journal.

Teaching experience grounds the Cornell program. MFA students design and teach writing-centered undergraduate seminars on a variety of topics, and they remain in Ithaca during the summer to teach in programs for undergraduates. 

Cornell even allows MFA graduates to stay on as lecturers at Cornell for a period of time while they are on the job search. Cornell also offers a joint MFA/Ph.D. program through the Creative Writing and English departments.

Endowments fund several acclaimed reading series, drawing internationally known authors to campus for workshops and work sessions with MFA students. 

Recent visiting readers include Salman Rushdie, Sandra Cisneros, Billy Collins, Margaret Atwood, Ada Limón, and others. 

Arizona State University (Tempe, AZ)

Arizona State’s MFA in Creative Writing spans three years, giving students ample time to practice their craft, develop a voice, and begin to find a place in the post-graduation literary world. 

Coursework balances writing and literature classes equally, with courses in craft and one-on-one mentoring alongside courses in literature, theory, or even electives in topics like fine press printing, bookmaking, or publishing. 

While students follow a path in either poetry or fiction, they are encouraged to take courses across the genres.

Teaching is also a focus in Arizona State’s MFA program, with funding coming from teaching assistantships in the school’s English department. Other exciting teaching opportunities include teaching abroad in locations around the world, funded through grants and internships.

The Virginia C. Piper Center for Creative Writing, affiliated with the program, offers Arizona State MFA students professional development in formal and informal ways. 

The Distinguished Writers Series and Desert Nights, Rising Stars Conference bring world-class writers to campus, allowing students to interact with some of the greatest in the profession. Acclaimed writer and poet Alberto Ríos directs the Piper Center.

Arizona State transitions students to the world after graduation through internships with publishers like Four Way Books. 

Its commitment to the student experience and its history of producing acclaimed writers—recent examples include Tayari Jones (Oprah’s Book Club, 2018; Women’s Prize for Fiction, 2019), Venita Blackburn ( Prairie Schooner Book Prize, 2018), and Hugh Martin ( Iowa Review Jeff Sharlet Award for Veterans)—make Arizona State University’s MFA a consistent leader among degree programs.

University of Texas at Austin (Austin, TX)

The University of Texas at Austin’s MFA program, the Michener Center for Writers, maintains one of the most vibrant, exciting, active literary faculties of any MFA program.

Denis Johnson D.A. Powell, Geoff Dyer, Natasha Trethewey, Margot Livesey, Ben Fountain: the list of recent guest faculty boasts some of the biggest names in current literature.

This three-year program fully funds candidates without teaching fellowships or assistantships; the goal is for students to focus entirely on their writing. 

More genre tracks at the Michener Center mean students can choose two focus areas, a primary and secondary, from Fiction, Poetry, Screenwriting, and Playwriting.

The Michener Center for Writers plays a prominent role in contemporary writing of all kinds. 

The hip, student-edited Bat City Review accepts work of all genres, visual art, cross genres, collaborative, and experimental pieces.  

Recent events for illustrious alumni include New Yorker publications, an Oprah Book Club selection, a screenwriting prize, and a 2021 Pulitzer (for visiting faculty member Mitchell Jackson). 

In this program, students are right in the middle of all the action of contemporary American literature.

Washington University in St. Louis (St. Louis, MO)

The MFA in Creative Writing at Washington University in St. Louis is a program on the move: applicants have almost doubled here in the last five years. 

Maybe this sudden growth of interest comes from recent rising star alumni on the literary scene, like Paul Tran, Miranda Popkey, and National Book Award winner Justin Phillip Reed.

Or maybe it’s the high profile Washington University’s MFA program commands, with its rotating faculty post through the Hurst Visiting Professor program and its active distinguished reader series. 

Superstar figures like Alison Bechdel and George Saunders have recently held visiting professorships, maintaining an energetic atmosphere program-wide.

Washington University’s MFA program sustains a reputation for the quality of the mentorship experience. 

With only five new students in each genre annually, MFA candidates form close cohorts among their peers and enjoy attentive support and mentorship from an engaged and vigorous faculty. 

Three genre tracks are available to students: fiction, poetry, and the increasingly relevant and popular creative nonfiction.

Another attractive feature of this program: first-year students are fully funded, but not expected to take on a teaching role until their second year. 

A generous stipend, coupled with St. Louis’s low cost of living, gives MFA candidates at Washington University the space to develop in a low-stress but stimulating creative environment.

Indiana University (Bloomington, IN)

It’s one of the first and biggest choices students face when choosing an MFA program: two-year or three-year? 

Indiana University makes a compelling case for its three-year program, in which the third year of support allows students an extended period of time to focus on the thesis, usually a novel or book-length collection.

One of the older programs on the list, Indiana’s MFA dates back to 1948. 

Its past instructors and alumni read like the index to an American Literature textbook. 

How many places can you take classes in the same place Robert Frost once taught, not to mention the program that granted its first creative writing Master’s degree to David Wagoner? Even today, the program’s integrity and reputation draw faculty like Ross Gay and Kevin Young.

Indiana’s Creative Writing program houses two more literary institutions, the Indiana Review, and the Indiana University Writers’ Conference. 

Students make up the editorial staff of this lauded literary magazine, in some cases for course credit or a stipend. An MFA candidate serves each year as assistant director of the much-celebrated and highly attended conference . 

These two facets of Indiana’s program give graduate students access to visiting writers, professional experience, and a taste of the writing life beyond academia.

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (Ann Arbor, MI)

The University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program cultivates its students with a combination of workshop-driven course work and vigorous programming on and off-campus. Inventive new voices in fiction and poetry consistently emerge from this two-year program.

The campus hosts multiple readings, events, and contests, anchored by the Zell Visiting Writers Series. The Hopgood Awards offer annual prize money to Michigan creative writing students . 

The department cultivates relationships with organizations and events around Detroit, so whether it’s introducing writers at Literati bookstore or organizing writing retreats in conjunction with local arts organizations, MFA candidates find opportunities to cultivate a community role and public persona as a writer.

What happens after graduation tells the big story of this program. Michigan produces heavy hitters in the literary world, like Celeste Ng, Jesmyn Ward, Elizabeth Kostova, Nate Marshall, Paisley Rekdal, and Laura Kasischke. 

Their alumni place their works with venerable houses like Penguin and Harper Collins, longtime literary favorites Graywolf and Copper Canyon, and the new vanguard like McSweeney’s, Fence, and Ugly Duckling Presse.

University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN)

Structure combined with personal attention and mentorship characterizes the University of Minnesota’s Creative Writing MFA, starting with its unique program requirements. 

In addition to course work and a final thesis, Minnesota’s MFA candidates assemble a book list of personally significant works on literary craft, compose a long-form essay on their writing process, and defend their thesis works with reading in front of an audience.

Literary journal Great River Review and events like the First Book reading series and Mill City Reading series do their part to expand the student experience beyond the focus on the internal. 

The Edelstein-Keller Visiting Writer Series draws exceptional, culturally relevant writers like Chuck Klosterman and Claudia Rankine for readings and student conversations. 

Writer and retired University of Minnesota instructor Charles Baxter established the program’s Hunger Relief benefit , aiding Minnesota’s Second Harvest Heartland organization. 

Emblematic of the program’s vision of the writer in service to humanity, this annual contest and reading bring together distinguished writers, students, faculty, and community members in favor of a greater goal.

Brown University (Providence, RI)

One of the top institutions on any list, Brown University features an elegantly-constructed Literary Arts Program, with students choosing one workshop and one elective per semester. 

The electives can be taken from any department at Brown; especially popular choices include Studio Art and other coursework through the affiliated Rhode Island School of Design. The final semester consists of thesis construction under the supervision of the candidate’s faculty advisor.

Brown is the only MFA program to feature, in addition to poetry and fiction tracks, the Digital/Cross Disciplinary track . 

This track attracts multidisciplinary writers who need the support offered by Brown’s collaboration among music, visual art, computer science, theater and performance studies, and other departments. 

The interaction with the Rhode Island School of Design also allows those artists interested in new forms of media to explore and develop their practice, inventing new forms of art and communication.

Brown’s Literary Arts Program focuses on creating an atmosphere where students can refine their artistic visions, supported by like-minded faculty who provide the time and materials necessary to innovate. 

Not only has the program produced trailblazing writers like Percival Everett and Otessa Moshfegh, but works composed by alumni incorporating dance, music, media, and theater have been performed around the world, from the stage at Kennedy Center to National Public Radio.

University of Iowa (Iowa City, IA)

When most people hear “MFA in Creative Writing,” it’s the Iowa Writers’ Workshop they imagine. 

The informal name of the University of Iowa’s Program in Creative Writing, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop was the first to offer an MFA, back in 1936. 

One of the first diplomas went to renowned writer Wallace Stegner, who later founded the MFA program at Stanford.

 It’s hard to argue with seventeen Pulitzer Prize winners and six U.S. Poets Laureate. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop is the root system of the MFA tree.

The two-year program balances writing courses with coursework in other graduate departments at the university. In addition to the book-length thesis, a written exam is part of the student’s last semester.

Because the program represents the quintessential idea of a writing program, it attracts its faculty positions, reading series, events, and workshops the brightest lights of the literary world. 

The program’s flagship literary magazine, the Iowa Review , is a lofty goal for writers at all stages of their career. 

At the Writers’ Workshop, tracks include not only fiction, poetry, playwriting, and nonfiction, but also Spanish creative writing and literary translation. Their reading series in association with Prairie Lights bookstore streams online and is heard around the world.

Iowa’s program came into being in answer to the central question posed to each one of these schools: can writing be taught? 

The answer for a group of intrepid, creative souls in 1936 was, actually, “maybe not.” 

But they believed it could be cultivated; each one of these institutions proves it can be, in many ways, for those willing to commit the time and imagination.

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Graduate & professional study.

Yale offers advanced degrees through its Graduate School of Arts & Sciences and 13 professional schools. Browse the organizations below for information on programs of study, academic requirements, and faculty research.

Graduate School of Arts & Sciences

Yale’s Graduate School of Arts & Sciences offers programs leading to M.A., M.S., M.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees in 73 departments and programs.

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The Yale School of Architecture’s mandate is for each student to understand architecture as a creative, productive, innovative, and responsible practice.

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The Yale School of Art has a long and distinguished history of training artists of the highest caliber.

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Yale Divinity School educates the scholars, ministers, and spiritual leaders of the future.

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The David Geffen School of Drama graduates have raised the standards of professional practice around the world in every theatrical discipline, creating bold art that engages the mind and delights the senses.

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The Yale School of Nursing community is deeply committed to the idea that access to high quality patient‐centered health care is a social right, not a privilege.

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The School of Public Health supports research and innovative programs that protect and improve the health of people around the globe.

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The Faculty of Arts and Sciences is composed of the departments and academic programs that provide instruction in Yale College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Centers & Institutes

A number of our centers and institutes offer additional opportunities for graduate and professional study.

MFA Program in Creative Writing

The Creative Writing Program offers the MFA degree, with a concentration in either poetry or fiction. MFA students pursue intensive study with distinguished faculty committed to creative and intellectual achievement.

Each year the department enrolls only eight MFA students, four in each concentration. Our small size allows us to offer a generous financial support package that fully funds every student. We also offer a large and diverse graduate faculty with competence in a wide range of literary, theoretical and cultural fields. Every student chooses a special committee of two faculty members who work closely alongside the student to design a course of study within the broad framework established by the department.

Students participate in a graduate writing workshop each semester and take six additional one-semester courses for credit, at least four of them in English or American literature, comparative literature, literature in the modern or Classical languages or cultural studies (two per semester during the first year and one per semester during the second year). First-year students receive practical training as editorial assistants for  Epoch, a periodical of prose and poetry published by the creative writing program. Second-year students participate as teaching assistants for the university-wide first-year writing program. The most significant requirement of the MFA degree is the completion of a book-length manuscript: a collection of poems or short stories, or a novel, to be closely edited and refined with the assistance of the student’s special committee.

MFA program specifics can be viewed here: MFA Timeline Procedural Guide

Special Committee

Every graduate student selects a special committee of faculty advisors who works intensively with the student in selecting courses and preparing and revising the thesis. The committee is comprised of two Cornell creative writing faculty members: a chair and one minor member. An additional member may be added to represent an interdisciplinary field. The university system of special committees allows students to design their own courses of study within a broad framework established by the department, and it encourages a close working relationship between professors and students, promoting freedom and flexibility in the pursuit of the graduate degree. The special committee for each student guides and supervises all academic work and assesses progress in a series of meetings with the students.

At Cornell, teaching is considered an integral part of training for a career in writing. The field requires a carefully supervised teaching experience of at least one year for every MFA candidate as part of the program requirements. The Department of English, in conjunction with the First-Year Writing Program, offers excellent training for beginning teachers and varied and interesting teaching in this university-wide program. These are not conventional freshman composition courses, but full-fledged academic seminars, often designed by graduate students themselves. The courses are writing-intensive and may fall under such general rubrics as “Portraits of the Self,” “American Literature and Culture,” “Shakespeare” and “Cultural Studies,” among others. A graduate student may also serve as a teaching assistant for an undergraduate lecture course taught by a member of the Department of Literatures in English faculty.

All MFA degree candidates are guaranteed two years of funding (including a stipend , a full tuition fellowship and student health insurance).

• Graduate Assistantship with EPOCH . Students read submissions, plan special issues and assume other editorial and administrative responsibilities.
• Summer Teaching Assistantship, linked to a teachers' training program. Summer residency in Ithaca is required.
• Teaching Assistantship
• Summer Fellowship (made possible by the David L. Picket ’84 Fund and The James McConkey Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing Award for Summer Support, established by his enduringly grateful student, Len Edelstein ’59)

Optional MFA Lecturer Appointments Degree recipients who are actively seeking outside funding/employment are eligible to apply to teach for one or two years as a lecturer. These positions are made possible by an endowment established by the late Philip H. Freund ’29 and a bequest from the Truman Capote Literary Trust.

Admission & Application Procedures

The application for Fall 2024 admission will open on September 15, 2023 and will close on December 15, 2023 at 11:59pm EST. Please note that staff support is available M-F 9am-4pm.

Eligibility : Applicants must currently have, or expect to have, at least a BA or BS (or the equivalent) in any field before matriculation. International students, please verify degree equivalency here . Applicants are not required to take the GRE test or meet a specified GPA minimum.

To Apply:  All applications and supplemental materials must be submitted on-line through the Graduate School application system . While completing your application, you may save and edit your data. Once you click “submit,” your application will be closed for changes. Please proofread your materials carefully. Once you pay and click submit, you will not be able to make any changes or revisions.

DEADLINE: Dec. 15, 11:59 p.m. EST . This deadline is firm. No applications, additional materials or revisions will be accepted after the deadline.

MFA Program Application Requirements Checklist

• Academic Statement of Purpose Please use the Academic Statement of Purpose to describe, within 1000 words: (1) your academic interests, (2) your academic background, preparation, and training, including any relevant professional experiences, (3) your reasons for pursuing graduate studies in this specific program, and (4) your professional goals.
• Personal Statement Your Personal Statement should provide the admissions committee with a sense of you as a whole person, and you should use it to describe how your background and experiences influenced your decision to pursue a graduate degree. Additionally, it should provide insight into your potential to contribute to a community of inclusion, belonging, and respect where scholars representing diverse backgrounds, perspectives, abilities, and experiences can learn and work productively and positively together. Writing your Personal Statement provides you with an opportunity to share experiences that provide insights into how your personal, academic, and/or professional experiences demonstrate your ability to be both persistent and resilient, especially when navigating challenging circumstances. The statement also allows you to provide examples of how you engage with others and have facilitated and/or participated in productive collaborative endeavors. Additionally, it provides you with an opportunity to provide context around any perceived gaps or weaknesses in your academic record. Content in the Personal Statement should complement rather than duplicate the content contained within the Academic Statement of Purpose, which should focus explicitly on your academic interests, previous research experience, and intended area of research during your graduate studies. A complete writing prompt is available in the application portal.
• Three Letters of Recommendation Please select three people who best know you and your work. Submitting additional letters will not enhance your application. In the recommendation section of the application, you must include the email address of each recommender. After you save the information (and before you pay/submit), the application system will automatically generate a recommendation request email to your recommender with instructions for submitting the letter electronically. If your letters are stored with a credential service such as Interfolio, please use their “online application delivery” feature and input the email address assigned to your stored document, rather than that of your recommender’s. The electronic files will be attached to your application when they are received and will not require the letter of recommendation cover page. Please do not postpone submitting your application while waiting for us to receive all three of your letters. We will accept recommendation letters until December 30,11:59pm EST . For more information please visit the Graduate School's page on preparing letters of recommendations .
• Transcripts Scan transcripts from each institution you have attended, or are currently attending, and upload into the academic information section of the application. Be sure to remove your social security number from all documents prior to scanning. Please do not send paper copies of your transcripts. If you are subsequently admitted and accept, the graduate school will require an official paper transcript from your degree-awarding institution prior to matriculation.
• English Language Proficiency Requirement All applicants must provide proof of English language proficiency. For more information, please view the  Graduate School’s English Language Requirement .
• Fiction applicants:  Your sample must be between 6,000 and 10,000 words, typed, double-spaced, in a conventional 12- or 14-point font. It may be an excerpt from a larger work or a combination of several works.
• Poetry applicants:  Your sample must be 10 pages in length and include a combination of several poems, where possible.

General Information for All Applicants

Application Fee: Visit the  Graduate School for information regarding application fees , payment options, and fee waivers . Please do not send inquires regarding fee waivers.

Document Identification: Please do not put your social security number on any documents.

Status Inquiries:  Once you submit your application, you will receive a confirmation email. You will also be able to check the completion status of your application in your account. If vital sections of your application are missing, we will notify you via email after the Dec. 15 deadline and allow you ample time to provide the missing materials. Please do not inquire about the status of your application.

Credential/Application Assessments:  The admission review committee members are unable to review application materials or applicant credentials prior to official application submission. Once the committee has reviewed the applications and made admissions decisions, they will not discuss the results or make any recommendations for improving the strength of an applicant’s credentials. Applicants looking for feedback are advised to consult with their undergraduate advisor or someone else who knows them and their work.

Review Process:  Application review begins after the submission deadline. Notification of admissions decisions will be made by email or by telephone by the end of February.

Connecting with Faculty and/or Students: Unfortunately, due to the volume of inquiries we receive, faculty and current students are not available to correspond with potential applicants prior to an offer of admission. Applicants who are offered admission will have the opportunity to meet faculty and students to have their questions answered prior to accepting. Staff and faculty are also not able to pre-assess potential applicant’s work outside of the formal application process. Please email [email protected] instead, if you have questions.

Visiting: The department does not offer pre-admission visits or interviews. Admitted applicants will be invited to visit the department, attend graduate seminars and meet with faculty and students before making the decision to enroll.

Transfer Credits: Transfer credits are not available toward the MFA program.

Admissions FAQ

For Further Information

Contact [email protected]

MFA in Creative Writing Graduation Readings

Yale Writers' Workshop Faculty Bios

You are here, yale writers' workshop faculty 2024 .

Our faculty are accomplished writers and editors.

"I loved Dr. McCauley! She inspired me to keep working and improving my writing, and also connected us with the publishing journal she works for internships! Her comments and critiques were extremely helpful to my writing."

• Guest Speakers

Sybil Baker

Sybil Baker's latest novel is Apparitions . She is also author of four other works of fiction, including  While You Were Gone (IPPY Silver Award winner),  The Life Plan, Talismans, and  Into This World , which received an Eric Hoffer Award Honorable Mention and a Foreword’s INDIES Book of the Year finalist. Her essay collection Immigration Essays was the 2018-2019 Read2Achieve first year selection at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. A UC Foundation Professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Sybil received a 2017 Individual Artist's Fellowship from the Tennessee Arts Commission for her work.

Jotham Burrello

Jotham Burrello is the director of the Yale Writers’ Workshop. His novel, Spindle City , was longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway award, and a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award. His writing has appeared in literary journals, the Hartford Courant , the  Christian Science Monitor , and he’s a proud winner of The New Yorker caption contest. He’s currently writing a new novel. He teaches writing at Central Connecticut State University, founded the CT Lit Fest, and is the former publisher of the award-winning Elephant Rock Books.

Trey Ellis is an American Book Award Winning novelist, two-time Emmy and Peabody winning filmmaker, NAACP Image award winning playwright, essayist and Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.  His acclaimed first novel, Platitudes , was reissued by Northeastern University Press along with his influential essay, The New Black Aesthetic .  He is also the author of Home Repairs and Right Here, Right Now and Bedtime Stories: Adventures in the Land of Single-Fatherhood.

Molly Gaudry

Molly Gaudry is the author of the verse novel Desire: A Haunting and the hybrid memoir, Fit Into Me: A Novel: A Memoir . Her verse novel We Take Me Apart was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Award and shortlisted for the PEN/Osterweil. She teaches at Stony Brook University.

Jennifer Maritza McCauley

Jennifer Maritza McCauley is the author of the cross-genre collection Scar On/Scar Off which received an IPPY award and When Trying to Return Home , a short story collection, which was an New York Times Editors' Choice, called one of the Best Short Fiction Books of the Year according to Kirkus Reviews and a "Best Book to Read in 2023" by Today. She has been granted fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kimbilio and CantoMundo. She teaches at the University of Houston-Clear Lake and is fiction editor at Pleiades.

Amy Shearn is the award-winning author of the novels Dear Edna Sloane, Unseen City, The Mermaid of Brooklyn, and How Far Is the Ocean From Here , as well as the forthcoming Animal Instinct (Putnam, 2025). She has worked as an editor at Medium, JSTOR, Conde Nast, and other organizations, and her work has appeared in many publications including the New York Times Modern Love column and Slate . Amy lives in Brooklyn with her two children.

Non-fiction

Mary Collins

Nonfiction offers a cornucopia of forms and a chance to explore the self, society, history and life! Mary Collins has embraced the challenge in her 30-year career and published biography, memoir, humor, personal essay, travel, opinion and, in 2023, an experimental collection of illustrated flash nonfiction essays. Her book, At the Broken Places: A Mother and Trans Son Pick Up the Pieces (Beacon), which she co-authored with her son Donald Collins, received several national awards and recognition. This is her sixth year with the Yale Summer Writing Program.

Lisa Page is co-editor of We Wear The Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America . Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, LitHub Weekly, Playboy, The Chicago Tribune and other publications and anthologies, including Skin Deep: Black Women and White Women Write About Race . Lisa has worked as an editor, speechwriter, lyricist, and actor. She is the former President of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. She is the Director of Creative Writing at the George Washington.

Kirsten Bakis

Kirsten Bakis is the author of King NYX (2024) which Victor LaValle called “a novel of delicious disquiet,” as well as the award-winning Lives of the Monster Dogs , which Jeff VanderMeer called “a classic.” She has been teaching at the Yale Writers’ Workshop since 2012.

Sergio Troncoso

Sergio Troncoso is the author of eight books, most recently Nobody’s Pilgrims , which won the Gold Medal for Best Novel- Adventure or Drama in English from the International Latino Book Awards. He also wrote A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son, which Junot Díaz called “a masterwork” and “an extraordinary performance.” Troncoso edited Nepantla Familias: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature on Families in between Worlds , which received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews. A Fulbright scholar, Troncoso is past president of the Texas Institute of Letters.

Write Here, Write Now

Patricia Ann McNair

Patricia Ann McNair's collection of stories,  The Temple of Air , won Southern Illinois University Devil’s Kitchen Readers Award, Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year, and was a finalist for Society of Midland Authors Fiction Award. It will be reissued in May 2024. Responsible Adults (stories), was named a Distinguished Favorite by The Independent Press Awards.   And These Are The Good Times  (essays), was a Montaigne Medal finalist. McNair is an associate professor emerita in Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Children and Young Adult

Sarah Darer Littman

Sarah Darer Littman is the award-winning author of humorous middle grade novels, and young adult novels exploring the intersection of teens and technology. Her most recent novel, Some Kind of Hate was a Sydney Taylor Honor book and has been chosen as a 2024 High School Read Aloud by the Indiana Library Federation. She celebrated her 60th birthday by finally becoming a bat mitzvah. Sarah teaches in the MFA program at Western CT State University

First Ten Pages: Fiction and Memoir

LaTanya McQueen

LaTanya McQueen is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment of the Arts (2022 Fellowship in Prose) and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She is the author of two books—the essay collection And It Begins Like This (Black Lawrence Press, 2017) and the novel When the Reckoning Comes (Harper Perennial, 2021). She is an Assistant Professor of English and teaches in the MFA program at NC State.

Personal Essay/Memoir

Mishka Shubaly

Mishka Shubaly is an author, songwriter, and storyteller. His most recent work, Cold Turkey: How to Quit Drinking By Not Drinking was a New York Times bestseller. He was awarded the Dean’s Fellowship for Fiction by Columbia University. His seven nonfiction Kindle Singles for Amazon have all been bestsellers. He tours around the world and has shared the stage with everyone from Yeah Yeah Yeahs to Richard Price. I Swear I’ll Make It Up to You , his hardcover memoir, was released in 2016. In 2022, Shubaly released a collection of his Kindle Singles The Long Run and Other True Stories  with a forward by Jeff Bezos.

Short Stories / Novel Excerpts

Louis Bayard

Louis Bayard is the author of 10 novels, including The Pale Blue Eye , adapted into the global #1 Netflix release starring Christian Bale, Jackie & Me , ranked by the Washington Post as one of the top novels of 2022, the national bestseller Courting Mr. Lincoln , The Black Tower , and Mr. Timothy , as well as the young-adult novel, Lucky Strikes . His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages.

Christina Chiu

Christina Chiu is the Grand Prize Winner of the James Alan McPherson Award for her novel Beauty , a Kirkus Best Books of 2020. She is also author of Troublemaker and Other Saints , winner of the Asian American Literary Award. Chiu’s stories appear in Tin House, Kweli Journal, Washington Square , and elsewhere. She curates The Pen Parentis Literary Salon. She is a founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and received her MFA from Columbia University.

Ethan Rutherford

Ethan Rutherford’s fiction has appeared in BOMB, Tin House, Electric Literature, Ploughshares, One Story , and The Best American Short Stories .  His first book, The Peripatetic Coffin , received honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award and was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection.  His second collection, Farthest South , was published by A Strange Object in May 2021, and his novel, North Sun , will be out in 2025.  He teaches Creative Writing at Trinity College lives in Connecticut with his family.

Emily Barton

Emily Barton’s three novels are The Book of Esther, Brookland , and The Testament of Yves Gundron . She writes short fiction, essays, and book reviews, primarily for The New York Times Book Review . Her work has earned grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She taught at Yale for five years, currently serves as Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin, and is excited to return to YWW this summer.

Jade Wong-Baxter

Jade Wong-Baxter joined the Frances Goldin Literary Agency in 2021, after spending three years at Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agents. Jade is looking for adult literary/upmarket fiction and narrative nonfiction, with an emphasis on narratives by and about people of color, as well as the perspectives of marginalized identities. Her clients include Chris Belcher ( Pretty Baby , Avid Reader; a 2022 Lambda Literary Award Finalist); Delia Cai ( Central Places , Ballantine, 2023); and Hannah Matthews ( You or Someone You Love , Atria, 2023). June 7 @ 2 pm

Mark Gottlieb

Mark Gottlieb, a vice president at Trident Media Group, NYC, stands as a leading literary agent with numerous industry deals. His successes include representing New York Times bestsellers and award-winning authors, securing film and TV adaptations. With a focus on career growth, he manages authors adeptly, leveraging resources at Trident. Having worked in Foreign Rights and run the Audiobook Department, Mark is dedicated to expanding his clientele and bringing authors to a broad audience, fueled by his passion for discovering and championing talented writers. June 7 @ 2 pm

Sonya Huber

Sonya Huber is the author of eight books, including the essay collection Love and Industry: A Midwestern Workbook , the writing guide V oice First: A Writer’s Manifesto , the award-winning essay collection on chronic pain, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys , and the activist memoir-in-a-day Supremely Tiny Acts . She teaches at Fairfield University and in the Fairfield low-residency MFA program. June 2 @ 2 pm

Christopher Madden

Christopher Madden is an author, educator, editor, and publisher. He is a founding partner of Connecticut’s Woodhall Press where he serves as the executive editor. He teaches literature at Fairfield University, publishing in the Fairfield MFA program, and is a student thesis advisor for the Johns Hopkins University MA in Creative Writing. He is the editor of numerous prize-winning books and has worked with poet laureates, New York Times bestselling authors, and emerging writers. June 2 @ 3:30 pm

Roma Panganiban

Roma Panganiban graduated from Allegheny College with a degree in English and Psychology, followed by postgraduate study in Modern and Contemporary Literature & Culture at the University of York (UK). She began her publishing career at The Gernert Company before joining Janklow & Nesbit in 2019; her list focuses on literary & upmarket fiction and narrative nonfiction, particularly by marginalized writers. She lives in Brooklyn and on the internet.  June 7 @ 2 pm

W.K. Stratton

A Western Heritage Award-winning poet,  W.K. (Kip) Stratton is the author of the Los Angeles Times bestseller The Wild Bunch: Sam Peckinpah, a Revolution in Hollywood , and the Making of a Legendary Film as well as nine other books. A finalist for the National Magazine Award, he has written for Texas Monthly, GQ, Outside, Sports Illustrated, Texas Highways , and other magazines. He's a past president and fellow of the Texas Institute of Letters. He lives in Austin. June 3 @ 2 pm

Jacinda Townsend

Jacinda Townsend is the author of Mother Country (Graywolf, 2022), winner of the 2023 Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Mother Country is also short-listed for both the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards. Townsend's first novel, Saint Monkey (Norton, 2014), winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction, was an Honor Book of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. June 6 @ 7:30 pm

Maria Whelan

Maria studied English and drama at the University College Dublin, then obtained her master’s in modern literature from the University of Edinburgh. Maria enjoys a blend of literary and commercial fiction, as well as speculative fiction and magical realism. She is fond of novels that straddle the cultural divide and speak to the current cultural moment or examine overlooked facets of society. Her authors include Luke Dumas, Audrey Burges, Vanessa Cuti, and Sarah Fay.  June 7 @ 2 pm

Matt Bell is the author most recently of the novel Appleseed (a New York Times Notable Book) and the craft book Refuse to Be Done , a guide to novel writing, rewriting, and revision. He is also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods , as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall , a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur's Gate II , and several other titles. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University. June 13 @ 7 pm

Kimberly Brower

Kimberly fell in love with reading when she picked up her first Babysitter’s Club book at the age of seven (Super Special editions were her favorites) and hasn’t been able to get her nose out of a book since. After spending a decade in the business world, it was kismet that she found herself in publishing. She takes great pride in her client list, from the debut authors to #1 NYT bestsellers. She previously worked for over two years at a boutique literary agency before starting her own. June 14

Audrey Crooks

Audrey Crooks is an Agent at Trident Media Group, where she represents literary and upmarket fiction, narrative nonfiction, and select memoir. Originally from Virginia, she joined Trident in 2020. Previously, Audrey worked at the Frances Goldin Literary Agency, worked a bookseller, and from 2017-2018 she lived in Jordan, working for a nonprofit serving Gazan women refugees. Audrey’s academic background is in poetry and Middle Eastern Studies. June 14

Kristina Marie Darling

Kristina Marie Darling is the author of thirty-nine books, and a twice-awarded Fulbright Scholar. Dr. Darling’s work has also been recognized with three residencies at Yaddo, a Villa Lena Foundation Fellowship, a Civita Institute Fellowship, and ten residencies at the American Academy in Rome. Currently a faculty member at The Los Angeles Review of Books Publishing Workshop. Dr. Darling is Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly. June 14

Kimberly Garrett Brown

Kimberly Garrett Brown is the Executive Editor of Minerva Rising Press. Her best-selling novel, Cora’s Kitchen , won the 2022 Story Circle Network Sarton Women’s Book Award for Historical Fiction and the 2022 Bronze Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award for multicultural fiction. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Black Lives Have Always Mattered, The Feminine Collective, Today’s Chicago Woman, Chicago Tribune , and elsewhere. She lives in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. June 14

Wanda Morris

Wanda M. Morris is the acclaimed author of Anywhere You Run . It was named One of the Top Ten Crime Fiction Books of 2022 by The New York Times and has received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal , and Booklist . Wanda has won numerous awards including the Anthony, the Lefty and named the 2023 Georgia Author of the Year for Mystery. Anywhere You Run was also longlisted for the prestigious Mark Twain Voice in American Literature Prize. June 13 @ 12:30 pm

Cat Richardson

Cat Richardson is the editor in chief of Bodega Magazine, a monthly online literary magazine that can be read in one sitting. Her poetry has appeared in magazines such as Narrative, Ploughshares, Tin House , and Four Way Review , among others. You can find her reviews and interviews at Poets & Writers, Publishers Weekly, Pleiades, and The National Book Foundation . She is also the director of content strategy and development at NYU's Office of Marketing Communications. June 14

Julie Stevenson

Julie is a literary agent with Massie & McQuilkin. She represents literary and upmarket fiction, suspense, memoir, graphic novels, narrative nonfiction, young adult fiction and children’s picture books. She is drawn to storytelling with unforgettable characters, an authorial command of voice, and a strong sense of narrative tension. She’s agented books that have won the Pulitzer Prize, the MWA Edgar Award, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Caldecott Honor.   June 14

C Pam Zhang

C Pam Zhang is the author of two bestselling novels, How Much of These Hills Is Gold and Land of Milk and Honey . She a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, a Booker Prize nominee, and the winner of the Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award, the Asian/Pacific Award for Literature, and the California Book Award. Zhang’s writing appears in Best American Short Stories, The Cut, The New Yorker, and The New York Times . June 12 @ 12:30 pm

Courses & Programs

• Courses at Yale
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Creative Writing (MFA)

Program description.

The MFA Program in Creative Writing consists of a vibrant community of writers working together in a setting that is both challenging and supportive. This stimulating environment fosters the development of talented writers of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. The program is not defined by courses alone, but by a life built around writing.

Through innovative literary outreach programs, a distinguished public reading series, an exciting public student reading series, special literary seminars with visiting writers, and the production of a high-quality literary journal, students participate in a dynamic literary community actively engaged in all aspects of the literary arts—writing, reading, teaching, publishing and community outreach. Students also have the opportunity to enjoy America's most literary terrain; New York University is situated in the heart of Greenwich Village, a part of the city that has always been home to writers.

The MFA in Creative Writing is designed to offer students an opportunity to concentrate intensively on their writing. This program is recommended for students who may want to apply for creative writing positions at colleges and universities, which often require the MFA degree. The MFA program does not have a foreign language requirement.

All applicants to the Graduate School of Arts and Science (GSAS) are required to submit the  general application requirements , which include:

• Academic Transcripts
• Test Scores  (if required)
• Applicant Statements
• Résumé or Curriculum Vitae
• Letters of Recommendation , and
• A non-refundable  application fee .

See Creative Writing for admission requirements and instructions specific to this program.

Program Requirements

Special project, program information.

Taken in four separate semesters.

Craft courses may be repeated provided they are taught by different instructors.

With the permission of that department and of the director of the CWP. 

Additional Program Requirements

A creative special project in poetry or fiction, consisting of a substantial piece of writing—a novella, a collection of short stories, or a group of poems—to be submitted in the student’s final semester. The project requires the approval of the student’s faculty adviser and of the director of the CWP.

The MFA degree may also be earned through the Low Residency MFA Writers Workshop in Paris. Under this model, degree requirements remain the same, although Craft courses and Workshops take the form of intensive individualized courses of study with the faculty, including three substantial packet exchanges of student work per semester. All students earning the MFA degree through the low-residency program must also participate in five ten-day residencies in Paris, which involve a diverse series of series of craft talks, lectures, readings, special events, faculty mentorship meetings, and professional development panels.

Sample Plan of Study

Learning outcomes.

Upon successful completion of the program, graduates will have achieved the following learning outcomes:

• Graduate students in the Creative Writing Program at NYU work intensively with faculty mentors in writing workshops and individual conferences to learn and master the basic elements of the craft of fiction, creative nonfiction, or poetry.
• Students are expected to read widely and deeply, and to acquire a broad practitioner’s knowledge of English and American literature in their declared concentration (poetry, creative nonfiction, or fiction).
• Students are taught to read carefully and critically, and in doing so learn to read as writers. By studying great novels, poems, and works of literary nonfiction by other writers, students learn how to write their own.
• The two-year program of intensive study culminates in the completion of a creative thesis -- a novel, a collection of stories or essays, or a collection of poems. The thesis manuscript, ideally, is a working draft of a first book. Many program alumni go on to publish books and win awards for their writing.

Grading and GPA Policy

Nyu policies, graduate school of arts and science policies.

To qualify for the degree, a student must have a GPA of at least 3.0, must complete a minimum of 24 points with a grade of B or better, and may offer no more than 8 points with a grade of C (no more than 4 points with a grade of C in creative writing workshops). A student may take no more than 36 points toward the degree.

University-wide policies can be found on the New York University Policy pages .

Academic Policies for the Graduate School of Arts and Science can be found on the Academic Policies page . 

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The NYU Creative Writing Program

is among the most distinguished programs in the country and is a leading national center for the study of writing and literature.

Graduate Program

The graduate Creative Writing Program at NYU consists of a community of writers working together in a setting that is both challenging and supportive.

Low Residency MFA Workshop in Paris

The low-residency MFA Writers Workshop offers students the opportunity to develop their craft in one of the world's most inspiring literary capitals.

Undergraduate Program

The undergraduate program offers workshops, readings, internships, writing prizes, and events designed to cultivate and inspire.

Spring 2022 Reading Series

The lively public Reading Series hosts a wide array of writers, translators, and editors, and connects our program to the local community.

Creative Writing Program

Low-residency mfa writers workshop in paris, undergraduate, washington square review, literary journal, a sample residency calendar, write in paris, scholarships and grant opportunities, program of study, dates and deadlines, creative writing, recent highlights from the mfa community.

• Alum Bruna Dantas Lobato   won the 2023 National Book Award in translation

• Faculty member Sharon Olds received the Joan Margarit International Poetry Prize from King Felipe VI in July 2023

• Alumni  Tess Gunty  and  John Keene   each won a 2022 National Book Award in fiction and poetry , respectively

• Books by faculty members  Sharon  Olds  and  Meghan O'Rourke;  and alums  Tess Gunty, John Keene ,  and  Jenny Xie  were named finalists for the 2022 National Book Awards; books by alum  Rio Cortez and faculty member Leigh Newman were also longlisted

• Alum  Ada Limón   has been named the nation's 24th Poet Laureate  by the Library of Congress

• Alum  Amanda Larson 's debut poetry collection  GUT  was selected by Mark Bibbins as the winner of the Poetry Society of America Norma Farber Book Award

• Alum  Sasha Burshteyn  was named a 2022 winner of the 92Y Discovery Prize. Alums Jenna Lanzaro and JinJin Xu were also named semi-finalists for the prize.

• Alum Clare Sestanovich was selected as a  2022 5 under 35 Honoree  by the National Book Foundation

• Alum  Maaza Mengiste  was awarded a  2022 Guggenheim Fellowship

• Visiting graduate faculty member  Brandon Taylor 's collection  Filthy Animals  was named a 2021/22  finalist for The Story Prize  and was shortlisted for the  2022 Dylan Thomas Prize

• Alum  Raven Leilani  won the 2021 Clark Fiction Prize, Dylan Thomas prize, the 2020 Kirkus Prize for Fiction and the Center for Fiction 2020 First Novel Prize for her debut novel  Luster,  and was named a finalist for the 2021 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, the Gotham Book Prize, the 2021 PEN/Hemmingway Award for Debut Novel, the 2021 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award

• Alum Desiree C. Bailey 's debut poetry collection  What Noise Against the Cane  was longlisted for the 2022 Dylan Thomas Prize and was also named a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award in Poetry and the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and was published as the winner of the 2020 Yale Series of Younger Poets

• Senior faculty member  Sharon Olds  was named the 2022 recipient of the Poetry Society of America's Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry

You can read more MFA Community news here and find a list of forthcoming and recently published books by alumni here .   NYU CWP alumni include  Aria Aber, Amir Ahmadi Arian, Julie Buntin, Nick Flynn, Nell Freudenberger, Aracelis Girmay, Isabella Hammad, Ishion Hutchinson, Mitchell S. Jackson, Tyehimba Jess, John Keene, Raven Leilani, Robin Coste Lewis, Ada Limón, Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Maaza Mengiste, John Murillo, Gregory Pardlo, Morgan Parker, Nicole Sealey, Solmaz Sharif, Peng Shepherd, Ocean Vuong, Jenny Xie,  and  Javier Zamora. 

Announcements

Ocean Vuong joins the NYU Creative Writing Program Faculty

Mary Gabriel, Author of “Ninth Street Women”, Receives the NYU/Axinn Foundation Prize

Claudia Rankine joins the NYU Creative Writing Program Faculty

Classic podcasts from the lillian vernon reading series.

Anne Carson

Zadie Smith and Jeffrey Eugenides

Terrance Hayes

Where to find us.

Faculty Spotlight

Sharon Olds is a previous director of the Creative Writing Program. Her 2012 collection Stags Leap was awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize and a Pulitzer.

Darin Strauss is the author of several acclaimed novels, including the most recent The Queen of Tuesday: A Lucille Ball Story.

Foer was listed in Rolling Stone's "People of the Year," Esquire's "Best and Brightest," and The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" list.

Jeffrey Eugenides is the author of acclaimed novels The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex, and The Marriage Plot. His latest collection is Fresh Complaint. 

Katie Kitamura’s most recent novel Intimacies was longlisted for the National Book Award and named a Best Book of 2021 by numerous publications.

Hari Kunzru is the author of six novels, including the most recent Red Pill, and White Tears, a finalist for the PEN Jean Stein Award.

Claudia Rankine is a recipient of the 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, and the author of six collections including Citizen and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely.

Terrance Hayes’s most recent publications include American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin and To Float In The Space Between.

Ocean Vuong is the author of the bestselling novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous and the poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds.

David Geffen School of Drama 2023 – 2024

Design (m.f.a. and certificate).

Riccardo Hernández, Cochair

Toni-Leslie James, Cochair

The purpose of the Design program is to develop theater artists who are accomplished, committed, daring designers of costume, lighting, projection, set, and sound for the theater. The program encourages students to discover their own process of formulating design ideas, to develop a discriminating standard for their own endeavors, and above all to prepare for a creative and meaningful professional life in the broad range of theater activities.

It is hoped that through their David Geffen School of Drama experience, design students discover a true sense of joy in working with other people and realize the excitement of evolving a production through the process of collaboration.

The program endeavors to create an atmosphere conducive to creative experimentation, tempered by honest, open criticism and disciplined study.

Students are admitted to the program on the basis of their artistic abilities as shown in their portfolios, as well as their commitment to the theater and their ability to articulate their ideas.

Approximately seventeen students are admitted each year. There is a high faculty-to-student ratio. We make a strong personal commitment to each student who is accepted, and we work to provide the resources necessary for all students to succeed in the program.

The student’s training is accomplished through approximately equal parts classroom work and production experience. A balance between theoretical work, which students conceive of and develop in the classroom, and projects that are realized on stage, is the ever-present goal. Collaboration among disciplines, both within and without the Design program, is a constant practice.

All Design concentrations are closely interrelated. Each is part of a greater whole. Therefore, with some exceptions, students in their first year of study take classes in all five design concentrations. Starting in the second year, the required sequence of courses for each student focuses more closely on the student’s primary area or areas of concentration.

The program reserves the right to alter the required sequence when necessary in order to provide each student the experience best suited to the student’s particular circumstances and goals.

The Design program is committed to dismantling racism by engaging in an ongoing examination of the policies and practices of the program and the profession in general in order to expose biases and systemic advantage/oppression where they exist and to build a safe, welcoming, and inclusive environment through anti-racist practices.

Plan of Study: Costume Design

Our Costume Design concentration is dedicated to the training of new generations of designers in a diverse community of students and teachers where we fully embrace different perspectives and backgrounds as we actively promote diversity through our curriculum, performances, and student experiences. The study of costume design requires us to continuously explore new ways of storytelling as we examine the human spirit to be able to communicate the life condition of the character through clothing on the stage. Students must have knowledge of the vocabulary of design and be able to communicate all aspects pertaining to the profession in order to achieve this goal in a safe, welcoming, and inclusive environment that promotes anti-racist practices. Through class projects, practical and theoretical, and real experience working on academic and professional productions, students will leave the university setting and become valuable, vocal, and seen members of the entertainment industry.

The first year of study is dedicated to the background and practice of costume design to develop the students’ technical skills in life drawing and costume construction, their knowledge of costume history, and a thorough grounding in the business of professional costume design, integrating technical skills with theoretical understanding as students take courses in every design concentration. The second year enhances the students’ analytical/dramaturgical thinking and critical aesthetic voices in the execution of designs in collaboration with student and professional directors, with advanced classes in life drawing and digital costume illustration. The third-year students continue their training based on professional-level processes and practices with an established director, culminating in the design of a professional production. Our training strives to create new and lasting relationships between designers, directors, actors, and technicians, evolving into a diverse community that shares a unique and bold aesthetic as our students enter the professional world.

Class of 2026

Required sequence, year one (2023–2024), year two (2024–2025), year three (2025–2026), class of 2025, year two (2023–2024), year three (2024–2025), class of 2024, year four (2023–2024), plan of study: lighting design.

Lighting cannot be taught in the classroom. Words and two-dimensional representations are not adequate to express all that needs to be expressed or to communicate all that needs to be communicated when exploring and discovering the role light can play in live theatrical performance. Light must be experienced firsthand, in space and in time. Moreover, like playing an instrument, the skills involved in lighting must be practiced constantly. Therefore, in the Lighting Design concentration, we prioritize realized production work and exercises done in theaters or the light lab over theoretical, paper projects.

Light is intricately intertwined with all the other design concentrations. The configuration of the scenery determines what lighting possibilities exist in any given production; the silhouettes created by the costumes and their color palette have everything to do with the composition of the stage picture and the color palette of the lighting; the aural landscape and the rhythm of the lighting are two parts of a single whole; projected imagery is a kind of light itself. For these reasons, lighting students study the other concentrations, and we include students of the other concentrations in our lighting classes, as far as the schedule will allow. Lighting students also study figure drawing, as the human figure is the basis of our sense of composition, and drawing is the best possible training for the eye.

Plan of Study: Projection Design

The professional future of projection designers will most likely expand beyond collaborative work in text-based, director-driven work to include independent work in concerts, ballets, installation, and even film. The goal of this program is to strengthen student skills in all areas. The focus of the first-year core curriculum is to explore communication in the various modalities and languages of theatrical design as well as development of storytelling skills, whether it be through the generating of technical drawings, the expressive communication of a sketch, the construction of a scenic model, or setting moving image to music. Student designers may be assigned as assistants, content creators, or programmers.

Collaborative projects anchor the second year of study. Students take part in an interdepartmental course with the Directing Program called DRAM 232a/b, Advanced Discussions in Directing and Scenography. This course seeks to cultivate and reinforce the creative relationship and professional-level processes between directors and designers, concentrating on an in-depth analysis of a selection of twentieth- and twenty-first century plays and operas. Shorter collaborative projection projects range from classroom exploration of a moment from a new play, student curiosity, as well as two produced evenings of Opera Scenes with Yale School of Music. In the second year, there are elective slots students should program according to their specific needs and interests and in conversation with the faculty. Student design assignments can include design work on student directors’ thesis projects.

In their third year, students prepare and present an original work as their thesis project. There may be a professional assignment at Yale Rep as well. As teachers our role is to mentor and support the exploration, discovery, and creation of a thesis project, as well as to prepare students to enter the ever-changing landscape of media design.

Over the course of three years it is our goal to provide significant opportunity to explore opera, dance, installation, and self-devised work in addition to text-based works. Technical classes and workshops will be offered on a rotating basis.

Plan of Study: Set Design

The three-year curriculum arc (scenography).

In the first year, students delve into a wide spectrum of classic texts, operas, and musicals alongside modern and contemporary works. The goal is to create three-dimensional models every week and present the completed model (1/8-in. or 1/4-in. scale) the following week. This structure provides the foundation on which the following two years are based. During the course of the year the students also assist on student productions and at the Yale Repertory Theater.

In the second year, the set designers meet twice per week. On Wednesdays the students take part in an interdisciplinary course with the Directing program in DRAM 232a/b Advanced Discussions in Directing and Scenography. This course seeks to cultivate and reinforce the creative relationship and professional-level processes between directors and designers, concentrating on an in-depth analysis of a selection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century plays and operas. On Fridays the students meet with the Set Design faculty in discussions that expand and deepen the exploration of the texts discussed in the Wednesday collaborative class from a scenographic perspective. There are two projects per term, each culminating in a final presentation. Students also design for David Geffen School of Drama productions. At the end of the second year, students interview with directors for Yale Repertory Theatre productions which they design the following school year.

In the third year, the students choose their own texts and operas, including adaptations. Having a strong foundation in classic, modern, and contemporary works to draw on, the students are able to develop a more personal approach. The second term of the third year concentrates on a thesis that is presented to the entire Design faculty. It is also during this year the students design a Yale Repertory Theatre or Yale Opera production.

The overall mission of the program is to nurture a thorough appreciation of existing scenographic traditions as well as a vigorous commitment to developing individual voices for a more equitable, diverse, and inclusive American theater.

Plan of Study: Sound Design

Sound is inherently personal. Beautiful sonics for any two people will be different, yet the overall goal of the Sound Design concentration at David Geffen School of Drama is to find the bridge between the personal and the universal, to discover the essence and atomic quality of sound such that one can bring one’s personal perspective while being able to effectively communicate one’s concepts with anyone. Openness, inclusiveness, and rigorous work ethic are the necessary qualities one must have to achieve this goal in the Sound Design concentration. There will be many collaborative circumstances, from the classroom to the professional stage at Yale Repertory Theatre, for students to have an opportunity to sharpen their technical skills and develop their creative voice.

The Sound Design experience at the School is unique in that the five areas of design—set, costume, lighting, projection, and sound—are integrated. This ensemble approach provides a foundation for the collaborative experience at the School. Students must be dedicated and willing to work hard. The course work covers design aesthetics, script interpretation, dramaturgy, music composition, critical listening, professional collaboration, sound and music technology, acoustics, aural imaging in large spaces, investigations into psychoacoustics, digital audio production, advanced sound delivery systems, advanced problem solving, advanced digital applications, production organization, and professional development, all in concert with a wide variety of practical assignments.

Additional Requirements for the Degree

Anti-racist theater practice requirement.

Design students are required to enroll in DRAM 3(02)a/b, Toward Anti-Racist Theater Practice in Design, in order to fulfill the School’s anti-racist theater practice requirement. Combined with the prerequisite workshop, Everyday Justice: Anti-Racism as Daily Practice, this course offers vital strategies for the lifelong development of individual and communal anti-racist practice.

Theater History Requirement

Lighting and sound design students are required to enroll in DRAM 6a/b, Survey of Theater and Drama in order to fulfil the School’s theater history requirement. First-year costume design students are required to enroll in DRAM 125a/b, The History of Costume, and first-year projection, lighting, and set-design students are required to enroll in DRAM 122a/b, The History of Set Design, in order to fulfil the School’s theater history requirement. These courses are considered a crucial foundation for the program’s students.

Courses of Instruction

DRAM 3(02)a/b, Toward Anti-Racist Theater Practice in Design This course meets five times per term with students, using readings, viewings, and discussions in pursuit of these goals: to identify the roots and branches of racism and white supremacy in the structures and practices of theater making in the United States, including at David Geffen School of Drama and Yale Repertory Theatre; to interrogate where the practices do harm and hinder; and to invest in the future by inviting students and faculty to imagine and uplift systems and cultures that do not depend upon or promote supremacy, to build a more just and equitable field. Required for first-year students and open to middle- and final-year students. Zahida Sherman

DRAM 6a/b, Survey of Theater and Drama See description under Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism.

DRAM 66a/THST 414a, Lyric Writing for Musical Theater See description under Playwriting.

DRAM 89b, Costume Construction See description under Technical Design and Production.

DRAM 104b, Computer-Assisted Design Techniques for Lighting Designers This course covers techniques, workflows, and best practices for using computer-assisted design (Vectorworks) to bring a lighting design from concept to professional drawing package. Students develop skills including drawing techniques; drawing structure and layout; utilizing working drawings; managing data and working with Lightwright; developing templates and libraries; and creating clear, well-styled drawings. Students receive individual guidance on approaching design project challenges and critiques of their drafting presentation. Open to non-Design students with prior permission of the instructor. Joshua Benghiat

DRAM 112a/b, Introduction to Set Design A two-term introduction for all first-year designers and interested non-design students to the process of scenic design through critique and discussions of weekly projects ranging from classic texts, operas, and musicals alongside modern and contemporary works. There are projects every two weeks. The goal is to create an in-depth examination of the assigned works leading to a three-dimensional model (1/8-in. or 1/4-in. scale) at the end of the second week. Emphasis is given to the examination of the text and the action of the play, the formulation of design ideas, the visual expression of the ideas, and especially the collaboration with directors and all other designers. There are invited speakers and playwrights discussing some of the works in class, expanding on the history and context in which the texts were written in order to have a more comprehensive and dramaturgical understanding of the play. Riccardo Hernández, Michael Yeargan

DRAM 115a/b, Introduction to Costume Design This course addresses the process and documentation of designing costumes. Designers are encouraged to develop their eye by careful study of primary source research, while developing the student’s knowledge of paperwork and budgeting used by professional costume designers in the creation of industry-standard production costume bibles. Course work requires that students produce many design sketches weekly. Open to non-Design and non-Drama students with prior permission of the instructor. Toni-Leslie James

DRAM 122a/b, The History of Set Design A survey of the history of the visual aspects of storytelling through the ages, from the Greeks to the present day. Though the course focuses primarily on the history of western culture, comparisons with theater techniques of other international cultures are also explored. A key element of the course is the relationship of the actors, storytellers, and performers to the observers of the events we call “theatre” and the evolution of the architectural structures that focuses this exchange of ideas, that have become known as “theatres.” Michael Yeargan

DRAM 124a/b, Introduction to Lighting Design This course is an introduction for all non-lighting design students to the aesthetics and the process of lighting design through weekly critique and discussion of theoretical and practical assignments. Emphasis is given to the examination of the action of the play in relation to lighting, the formulation of design ideas, the place of lighting in the overall production, and collaboration with directors, set, costume, and sound designers. Open to non-Design and non-Drama students with prior permission of the instructor. Alan C. Edwards

DRAM 125a/b, The History of Costume A detailed survey of the history of apparel worn throughout Western civilization to provide the student with a working vocabulary of period clothing and the ability to identify specific garments throughout history. Fall term: Ancient Greece–1600. Spring term: 1600–1900. Open to non-Design and non-Drama students with prior permission of the instructor. Toni-Leslie James

DRAM 132a/b, Advanced Set Design This course continues the work started in DRAM 112a/b. The course seeks to cultivate and reinforce advanced, professional-level processes and practices in scenography. It concentrates on an in-depth analysis of twentieth- and twenty-first-century plays and operas, with emphasis on transitions as a fundamental rhythmic element of contemporary design. This course is an extension of DRAM 232, focusing on design realization involving story boards, model making (1/4-in. and 1/2-in. scales), and detailed plans. Prerequisite: DRAM 112a/b. Riccardo Hernández, Michael Yeargan.

DRAM 134a/b, Advanced Lighting Design This course is designed to help the student develop a sense of, and a facility with, light as an element of a production. By the culmination of the course students should be comfortable calculating and predicting the behavior of light in three-dimensional space, the interaction of color in light with color in pigment and have an understanding of the contributions light can make to the meaning and style of a production. Projects are prepared consistent with best professional practices. Open to non-Design students who have taken DRAM 124a/b with permission of the instructor. Four hours a week. Stephen Strawbridge

DRAM 135a/b, Advanced Costume Design In parallel with DRAM 232, and building on the foundation established in previous classes, costume design students work on a conceptual design conceived through discussions and practices that give equal weight to all collaboration members. This course focuses on in-depth dramaturgical study, character analysis, and the psychology of clothing, exploring how character and story are revealed through clothing choices, starting at the beginning of the process with the text/music and culminating in a complete, conceptual design. Oana Botez

DRAM 138a/b, Production Sound Engineering This intensive engineering course covers the process of planning and installing professional sound delivery systems, focusing on the fundamentals of professional practice with the goal of preparing students for their production assignments. The course consists of lectures, demonstrations, and hands-on lab work. Software requirements are updated annually by the instructor and include programs for budgeting, drafting, and tuning large sound systems. Four hours a week. Mike Backhaus

DRAM 141b, Law and the Arts See description under Theater Management.

[ DRAM 142a/b, Advanced Professional Set Design The course seeks to cultivate and reinforce advanced, professional-level processes and practices in the work of third-year set designers. In designing plays, operas, and other dramatic works of their choosing, students are encouraged to evolve their own points of view and aesthetics. Work must be complete and comprehensive. Not offered in 2023–2024]

[ DRAM 145a/b, Advanced Professional Costume Design The course seeks to cultivate and reinforce advanced, professional-level processes and practices in the work of third-year costume designers. Students are encouraged to evolve their own points of view and aesthetics as designers. Not offered in 2023–2024]

DRAM 152a/b, Scenic Painting A studio class in painting techniques. Problems in textures, materials, and styles, preparing students to execute their own and other designs. Open to non-Design and non-Drama students with prior permission of the instructor. Three hours a week. Ru-Jun Wang

DRAM 155a/b, Evolution of Cut and Cloth This class is taught collaboratively with Costume Design faculty and senior drapers of the Costume Shop staff. This is a hands-on class examining the development of cloth with respect to fiber and technology paralleling the development of clothing creation throughout the world. Ilona Somogyi, Clarissa Youngberg

DRAM 158a/b, Introduction to Sound Design In this course, students develop an understanding about how sound and music can be used effectively as a tool to enhance meaning in a play. Students analyze scripts, develop critical listening skills, and learn the fundamentals of sound delivery systems as well as terms used to describe the perception and presentation of sound and music in a theatrical setting. Open to non-Design and non-Drama students with prior permission of the instructor. Limited enrollment. Two hours a week. Jill BC Du Boff

DRAM 162a/b, Life Drawing Studio A course in figure drawing for design students. Drawing is not merely a technique for presentation; it is the language that reveals one’s thoughts and thus creates a dialogue among the director, the designers, and their colleagues. Through drawing, one observes and records one’s world. Drawing informs and clarifies one’s vision and is an integral part of the formulation of a design. Drawing should be as natural to the visual designer as speaking; therefore, the program offers a weekly life drawing class so that design students can keep their skills honed. Two hours a week. Ru-Jun Wang

DRAM 164a/b, Professional Lighting Design This course aims to prepare students for the demanding artistic and practical situations faced in the professional theater environment. Projects will involve large-scale, complex challenges such as multi-set plays, musical comedies, operas, ballets, and repertory situations. Students are encouraged to evolve their own points of view and aesthetics in finding their solutions. Projects are prepared consistent with best professional practices. Open to non-Design students who have taken DRAM 134a/b with permission of the instructor. Two hours a week. Stephen Strawbridge and Alan C. Edwards

DRAM 165b, Costume Life Drawing The course serves as a visual language that translates human body and space through conscious observation. Each designer can look at the same object and/or space, but the translation becomes personal. Learning to observe and personalize the translation is the main goal of the course. The two-hour class sessions are an opportunity to focus only on the drawing task at hand. Using notebooks and journals, as well as reading and research methods to process ideas, students utilize the act of drawing to advance and integrate their individual studio practice both technically and conceptually. Group critiques, in conjunction with the drawing sessions, as well as individual meetings with the instructor, serve as integral components of the course. Permission of the instructor required. Oana Botez

DRAM 168b, Recording Arts In this course students learn basic recording practice for remote and studio sessions. Topics include analog and digital recording systems, spatial audio, elements of psychoacoustics, microphone theory and application, field recording, music recording, foley recording, monitoring, mixing practice, mastering, and setting expectations for professional practice in a studio environment. There are five recording projects. Required of all sound designers. Open to non-Drama graduate and professional-school students with prior permission of the instructor. Not open to undergraduates. Enrollment limited to six. Two hours a week. Faculty

DRAM 172a, Digital Compositing and Creation for Designers A comprehensive overview of modern, fast-paced compositing and creation techniques for creating 2D and 3D content. The creation of digital content and digital art has many far-reaching application across disciplines and across styles of work and thought. This course is focused on the fast-paced professional work flow of content creation for entertainment professionals, but the methods are universal in their scope and application. The course starts with fundamental industry standards such as Photoshop and AfterEffects; explores alternative emerging prosumer workflows and mobile platform creation; and begins to touch on advanced workflows in modeling/shading/rendering as fundamental components of Unreal engine, Unity, and Blender. Best professional practices are taught and adhered to throughout. Open to non-Design and non-Drama students with prior permission of the instructor. Joey Moro

[ DRAM 174a/b, Advanced Professional Lighting Design This course seeks to cultivate and reinforce advanced, professional-level processes and practices in the work of third-year lighting designers. In designing plays, operas, and other dramatic works, students are encouraged to evolve their own points of view and aesthetics. In the fall semester the class meets concurrently with DRAM 164a/b, Professional Stage Lighting Design. Projects align with the projects in that class. (See syllabus for DRAM 164a/b). In the spring term projects will be based on theoretical or realized productions chosen by the student with advice from faculty. The second project will constitute the lighting designer’s’ thesis. This project should be large in scale and should be completed according to the highest professional standards. Not offered in 2023–2024]

DRAM 184b, Previsualization for Lighting Design A survey of pre-visualization programs, their uses and application in the field of lighting for live entertainment. Joshua Benghiat

DRAM 185a/b, Digital Costume Illustration This course provides instruction in introductory and intermediary digital illustration techniques, focused on costume design application. Emphasis is placed on creating cohesive digital artwork through direct painting and drawing in Photoshop, as well as using existing photo resources to assist in the design and illustration process. Students begin with the basics of creating and manipulating line work, layer management and blending, and color application. Intermediary skills include understanding Smart Objects and their use, shading techniques, creating and manipulating patterns and layer fills, use of special tools and brushes, blending modes, nondestructive editing procedures, and the manipulation of existing photos into the cohesive whole. Prerequisites: a drawing tablet and access to and basic familiarity with Photoshop. Emily Tappan

DRAM 188a/b, Music Lab I This is a music lesson that will take the form of a laboratory for exploring music; for exploring how musical ideas, techniques, theory, traditions, and improvisation can be of use to designers for all sorts of problem solving. Sessions will be group-oriented and will involve a combination of improvisation, instruction in musical technique, and the sharing of our ideas and curiosities as the year progresses. This student-driven course is aimed at addressing the musical concerns and needs of the individual by strengthening performance skills and expanding our musical vocabulary. Musicians of any level of “experience” are welcome: this is not a class about “becoming” an accomplished musician, but about broadening our abilities to think musically. James Monaco

DRAM 189a, Costume Production See description under Technical Design and Production.

DRAM 202a/b, Advanced Set Design II Focusing on idea building, discovery, and point of view, this course concentrates on design development, allowing students to explore theatrical space for several productions. The class work builds upon students’ first-year experiences by giving a longer design and exploration period to dive deeper into both the text and the design process, while also exploring fundamentals of craft using the various means and materials available to communicate effectively in the collaborative process. Maruti Evans, Mikiko MacAdams

DRAM 204b, Collaboration Laboratory This course is an opportunity for students in the various design disciplines to exercise their imaginations and build collaborative skills using the resources of the Iseman theatre, including the light plots, sound plots, projection plots, and spacial configurations of the Shakespeare Repertory Projects which remain in place for a period of time after each of those productions closes. The class is divided into groups consisting of one designer from each discipline. Students from the Stage Management Program also participate in these collaborations. Groups are announced prior to the first class. Projects are based on iconic moments from plays and operas familiar to the students. Finished, polished presentations are not the goal; the focus is on process, not product. Design faculty

DRAM 212a/b, Independent Study There may be special circumstances in which a student is allowed to pursue a particular area of inquiry independently, and on the student’s own time. Faculty supervision and approval is required in formulating the goals and the methods to be employed and a timetable. Faculty

DRAM 222a/b, Drafting for Set Designers The fall-term course focuses on hand drafting for the stage. Students learn how to create a complete set of drawings suitable for budgeting and/or soliciting bids from shops in the professional theater. The spring-term course covers techniques, workflows, and best practices for using AutoCAD and Vectorworks to bring a set design from concept to professional drafting package. Students develop skills and techniques needed to create clear, well-styled drawings that communicate effectively. The class offers individual guidance on approaching design project challenges and critiques of drafting presentations. Open to non-Design students with prior permission of the instructor. Maruti Evans, Mikiko MacAdams

DRAM 224a/b, Introduction to Projection Design In this yearlong course, students develop an understanding of how projection can be integrated into the theatrical space and the consideration of media as a storytelling tool. Emphasis is on exploration, non-narrative storytelling collaboration, and thinking in pictures. Open to non-Design and non-Drama students with prior permission of the instructor. Wendall K. Harrington, Shawn Boyle

DRAM 225a/b, Costume Design Thesis This course is for Design students in their fourth year who are preparing a costume- design thesis needed to achieve their M.F.A. degrees. Students are given individual guidance and support as they continue to develop ideas and approaches for a large-scale theoretical project of their choosing. This class offers the space to hone their individual voice as professional costume designers. Ilona Somogyi

DRAM 228a, Drafting for Sound Design This course is designed to introduce students to drafting principles and techniques, with an emphasis in drafting for sound design. The course consists of participation-based demonstrations and practical assignments. It will focus primarily on VectorWorks but will also equip students with a working knowledge of AutoCAD, and will address 2D and 3D drafting in both programs. Drafting practices covered in this course will provide tools directly relevant to professional work assignments at the School of Drama and the Rep, but the drafting skills developed will be universal Stephanie Smith

DRAM 232a/b, Advanced Discussions in Directing and Scenography (2YCC) Second Year Collaboration Class. This course seeks to cultivate and reinforce the creative relationship and professional-level processes between directors and designers. The class concentrates on in-depth analysis of twentieth- and twenty-first-century plays and operas, with emphasis on unearthing visual landscapes and mise en scène from the given texts and scores. Design and Directing faculty and guests.

DRAM 238a, Advanced Engineering for Sound Design This course is designed to provide a practical examination of large-scale sound delivery systems using examples from professional production practice as well as current production assignments. The objective is to explore all aspects of sound reinforcement and conceptual design theory, practice, and contemporary tools including networks, large-format consoles, and loudspeaker arrays, and the use of assessment tools such as SMAART. Students have the opportunity to shape the course content through the critique of their current design projects. Enrollment limited to second-year sound designers. Two hours a week. Michael Backhaus

DRAM 239a, Projection Engineering See description under Technical Design and Production.

DRAM 242a/b, Drafting Review Session This class provides an open studio environment for students to receive support for both production and in-class work on model making, drafting, and general design techniques and processes. Maruti Evans, Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams

DRAM 244a, Motion Graphics and Film Production This course builds on the skills introduced in DRAM 172a and DRAM 272b and advances them to include rapid iterative content creation and cross-platform compositions. This course is aimed at theatrical projection designers and content creators for live events, however the skills are universal through the digital-art world. Most digital content workflows rely heavily on animation in the 2D space, so that is a main workflow, however 3D modeling and rendering is integrated throughout. Creation based on the physical properties of light and the surrounding world is paramount in the creation process. Exact course projects shift based on the needs of currently enrolled students. New projection mapping software and technology is integrated in class as an expansion of working holistically in 3D space. Open to non-design and non-drama students with prior permission of the instructor. Joey Moro

DRAM 254b, Content Previsualization and Advanced 3D Workflows This course builds on the skills introduced in DRAM 172a, DRAM 272b, and DRAM 244a and advances them to include rapid content creation and cross-platform 3D compositions. 3D previsualization that takes into account the physical properties of the world allows for unparalleled realism is the final product. Design is always a team sport, and “previz” is the way to communicate those visual ideas. We take animations from projects prior and current,and build them into 3D previz deliverables. We start with simple but effective 2D representations and advance to fully physically accurate 3D renders for clients and directors. 3D previz is a powerful and easy tool when approached with the interdisciplinary mindset this series of courses offers. Open to non-Design and non-Drama students with prior permission of the instructor. Joey Moro

DRAM 258a/b, Music Production for Drama This course covers making and dealing with music for drama, with a focus on workflows, methods, and practical skills. Topics include: spotting, writing methods, demos, orchestration, creative studio techniques, sampling, budgeting, recording session preparation, mixing, delivery. Required of all sound designers. Open to non-Design and non-Drama students with prior permission of the instructor. Limited enrollment. Two hours a week. Justin Ellington

DRAM 264a/b, 2YCC Projection Design Companion Class This companion course seeks to support the projection designer in navigating the creative relationship and design process between directors and designers. This section concentrates on strategies for meaningful participation in the design process prior to the realized vision of a physical space. The class interrogates the dramaturgical implications and impact of projection design on each production and the ways projection design could layer into, or lead, the visual storytelling. Shawn Boyle

DRAM 272b, Content Capture and Manipulation for Designers An overview and application of content capture. This course includes video shoots, video capture for greenscreen, Lidar 3D scanning, photogrammetry capture for 3D, and more. We then use these assets in digital compositing situations as in the fall term of DRAM 172a. Guided-capture projects are assigned to exercise specific compositing situations. This course is greatly enhanced by the multidisciplinary nature of the work. Professional practices in lighting, film, digital media, as well as traditional art workflows all function together to create something greater than the mere sum of their parts. We use cameras, both full-size and mobile, extensively in the capture and creation of media. Knowledge of photographic practices is encouraged but not required. Best professional practices are taught and adhered to throughout. Open to non-Design and non-Drama students with prior permission of the instructor. Joey Moro

DRAM 274a, Projection Shots and Systems Through drawings, a designer can communicate the needs, limitations, and possibilities of their system with the team long before they have entered the theater for technical rehearsals. Using existing scenic designs and projection scenarios, designers in this course focus on creating the drawings and support documents that communicate the system parameters to vendors, managers, and colleagues. Emphasis is put on the drawings and documents necessary to send the show out to bid with a commercial shop. Shawn Boyle

DRAM 278b, Advanced Sound Design This course focuses on design techniques associated with the challenges that face many sound designers and composers in theater, film, podcasting and audiobook production. Students execute seven to nine challenges with a variety of potential outcomes, each critiqued in class. Critical listening, musicality, dramaturgy, system design, editing, and audio delivery. All class work is intended to promote creativity, ingenuity, and adaptation. Required of all second-year sound designers. Open to non-Design and non-Drama students who have completed DRAM 158a/b and 168a/b. Limited enrollment. Two hours a week with substantial homework. Justin Ellington

DRAM 288a/b, Music Lab II This is a music lesson that will take the form of a laboratory for exploring music; for exploring how musical ideas, techniques, theory, traditions, and improvisation can be of use to designers for all sorts of problem solving. Sessions will be group-oriented and will involve a combination of improvisation, instruction in musical technique, and the sharing of our ideas and curiosities as the year progresses. This student-driven course is aimed at addressing the musical concerns and needs of the individual by strengthening performance skills and expanding our musical vocabulary. Musicians of any level of “experience” are welcome: this is not a class about “becoming” an accomplished musician, but about broadening our abilities to think musically. James Monaco

DRAM 289a, Draping See description under Technical Design and Production.

DRAM 314a, Dance and Design in Performance This course of eight modules explores historical and contemporary connections between Western theatrical dance and visual design (including photography, film, and costume/scenic design) as a means to inform and augment participants’ design practice. Considering selected theatrical dance works from the eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries, we examine how movement and design in performance function not only as sites of aesthetic, cultural, and political expression but also as focal points for issues of visibility and change. Our work encompasses critical readings of primary and secondary sources; class discussion; viewing of images, film, and, as applicable, live performance or exhibition, culminating in the creation and workshop performance of collaborative movement/design projects. Marjorie Folkman, Oana Botez

[ DRAM 324b, The Personal Film: Exploration and Expression The mining of memory and personal history is crucial to expanding our consciousness of the interplay of self with all humanity. It is at the core of all art making. This Spring Module 1 course explores examples of the craft while supporting students in producing a short film or personal essay. Open to non-Drama students only with permission of the instructor. No prerequisites. Not offered in 2023–2024]

DRAM 334a/b, Projection in Practice This course is built in a series of modules preparing students for the collaborative task of creating projection for the stage. For grading purposes, any two modules constitute a full-term course. Opera Scenes anchor every fall; other modules rotate yearly. Fall Module 1: Projection design in collaboration with Yale Opera to create for the Fall Opera Scenes in Sprague Hall. Fall Module 2: Exploring the use of projection in dance. Spring Module 1: A consideration of new plays or a look at installation and performance art in practice. Modules may rotate in any given year. Consult the syllabus for more detail. Wendall K. Harrington, Shawn Boyle, and others

DRAM 338b, Professional Audio Engineer Development Skills for the NY Sound Practitioner Working in sound in New York is like working nowhere else. In this course, we discuss the skills needed to navigate life in the city, both from the industry’s standpoint and from a more human angle. We discuss assistant design paperwork, Broadway-style mixing, unions as well as finances, subsistence jobs, and finding an apartment. This class is mostly in the form of discussion with limited homework or suggested readings. Elizabeth Sesha Coleman

[ DRAM 339b, Advanced Projection Engineering See description under Technical Design and Production. Not offered in 2023–2024]

DRAM 348a/b, Sound Design for Podcast, Film, and Television Sound Design can be applicable to many mediums and that has never been truer than it is today. In this class you’ll learn how to apply the tools you already know to creating a narrative podcast, mixing music dialogue for television and film, and everything leading up to those points. This class will cover the differences in terms, software, design, and application across these three mediums. Zachary Goldberg, Jill BC Du Boff

[ DRAM 354b, Advanced Media Production This combined classroom/online course focuses on the production of a collaborative music video utilizing advanced imaging and motion graphics techniques—including visual synthesis, motion tracking and stabilization, compositing, audio synchronization, and motion design—combining four on-site class sessions with custom-scheduled online production meetings, virtual tutorials and instruction, progress reviews, and a real-world, virtual digital production pipeline. Not offered in 2023–2024]

DRAM 358a/b, Professional Development This class is limited to sound design students and is focused on the development and execution of the final year thesis project. The class will also serve as a professional mentorship seminar for developing the student’s careers through their portfolio and other online materials as well as networking techniques to be most effective as an independent working professional. One hour each week. Limited enrollment. Jill BC Du Boff

DRAM 364a/b, Animation Studio A hands-on workshop aimed at creating expressive animations. From a simple movement to an expressive action, how do we create the appearance of intention, emotion, and materiality in moving images? The class is focused on experimentation: after reviewing the fundamentals of a particular style of animation, such as hand-drawn animation, stop-motion, cutouts, pixilation, or digital animation, students apply the concepts to exercises resulting in short films. The course emphasizes fundamental animation tools—timing interpolation, arcs, eases and squeezes, storyboarding, animatic—as well as animation software and basic camera techniques. Students learn how to use appropriate techniques to portray personality, create fluid body motions and organic movements, staging gesture, thought, material, weight, and lip-synch. The sessions consist of demonstrations, viewing of related works, hands-on experimentation, and critique. Computer editing and the use of digital cameras, scanners, and Wacom tablets are critical skills that provide the foundation for this class. Manuel Barenboim

DRAM 365b, Film and Television Costume Design and Management This course is a study of the professional processes of costuming for film and television production. The emphasis of the course is on the key components of organizational techniques currently in use by costume professionals and learning the language of the different paperwork distributed during the film process, in addition to two design projects incorporating Synconset. Production procedures are scrutinized for each stage of production from preproduction to wrap. Toni-Leslie James, Joshua Quinn, Nicole Kyrtsis

DRAM 368a, Spatial Audio Sadah Espii Proctor

DRAM 384a/b, Projection Production Process This course explores the projection designer’s process on projects including drama, opera, dance, musical theater, and themed entertainment. Students encounter, discuss, investigate, and prepare for the design challenges found in each unique production environment. The course functions as a guided brain trust for experimentation in design planning, presentation, and execution. Students are challenged to explore and refine the process by which they generate, develop, and communicate their design ideas, as they would in the process of developing a production. Permission of the instructors required. Shawn Boyle

[ DRAM 388a/b, Music Lab III See description under DRAM 188a/b. Not offered in 2023–2024]

DRAM 394b, Advanced Topics in Projection Design This course is a series of scheduled workshops in technology and design craft with invited specialists. It offers a range of opportunities, from insight into an artist’s way of working and exposure to new control systems, to exploring one’s own artistic interest and deeper explorations of known control software. Past technical workshops include: Touch Designer, Isadora, Mapping Matter, and Disguise. Previous guest artists include Miwa Matreyek, Cynthia Hopkins and Jeff Sugg, Dan Braun, Larry Reed, Lenore Malen, Josh Weisberg, and Kym Moore. Facilitators: Wendall K. Harrington, Shawn Boyle

[ DRAM 398a Storytelling in Sound Design In this course students explore the role of sound in story and how the character of a sound may influence both psychological and biological response. Students investigate the effect that audio frequencies have on mood and emotion and the function of music and sound throughout varying cultures. Students explore the balance of contemporary and historical sound when developing a period piece. There are three projects. Required of all sound designers. Not open to undergraduates. Enrollment limited to six. Two hours a week. Not offered in 2023–2024]

DRAM 402a/b, Set Seminar A weekly meeting of student set designers in all years of the program to discuss specific issues arising out of current School and Yale Rep productions so that all can learn from the challenges encountered and solutions discovered in actual production. The focus is on a horizontal, student-to-student exchange of knowledge, as opposed to the vertical, faculty-to-student teaching that happens in many classes. This forum is also open for discussion of any other topics that might influence the thinking of designers in the contemporary world, such as the work of influential designers, artists, and films. Michael Yeargan, Riccardo Hernández

DRAM 404a/b, Lighting Seminar A weekly meeting of student lighting designers in all years of the program to discuss specific issues arising out of current School and Yale Rep productions so that all can learn from the challenges encountered and solutions discovered in actual production. The focus is on a horizontal, student-to-student exchange of knowledge, as opposed to the vertical, faculty-to-student teaching that happens in many classes. This forum is also open for discussion of any other topics that might influence the thinking of designers in the contemporary world, such as the work of influential designers, artists, and films. Stephen Strawbridge, Alan Edwards

DRAM 412a/b, Set Design Thesis This course seeks to continue to cultivate and reinforce advanced, professional-level processes and practices in the work of fourth-year set designers. In designing plays, operas, and other dramatic works of their choosing, students are encouraged to evolve their own points of view and aesthetics. During the second semester students complete a comprehensive thesis project with the approval and guidance of the faculty to be presented at the end of the school year. Riccardo Hernández, Michael Yeargan

DRAM 414a/b, Projection Seminar Each production has unique challenges, and this course is an opportunity for all projection design students to learn vicariously through the productions designed by their colleagues. The seminar provides a time and space for the community of projection designers to examine their process throughout the production period, getting weekly feedback in areas where they have asked for help or guidance in areas where their mentors see they need support, and brainstorming with the group. Using the analogy of Yale Repertory Theatre as a teaching hospital, this seminar is the skills lab. This is also a time to discuss what’s happening in theater, film, motion graphics, music, dance, opera, visual art, and sculpture as it relates to, or inspires, our field. Facilitated by Shawn Boyle

DRAM 418a/b, Sound Seminar These regular meetings are required of all sound designers. Sound Seminar is a lab for sound designers to unpack their process for current projects they are developing for their production assignments for DGSD as well as an opportunity to further cultivate their skills with in-class creative assignments. As for the DGSD production assignments, each sound designer and assistant sound designer formally presents their current production as they are working on it; tools like PowerPoint and Google Slides can be used. From design, dramaturgy, budgeting, and a post-mortem analysis of the production, the class dissects and discovers the nuances of each show at DGSD. All sound design students must read each play. In addition, sound design students have an opportunity to develop their sound skills on the fly with in-class creative assignments meant to develop their impromptu skillset. We also include guest artists (designers, composers, directors, engineers, consultants, and other theater professionals) to further understand the sound design industry at large. Class meets two hours a week. Jill BC Du Boff, Justin Ellington, Mike Backhaus

DRAM 424a/b, Lighting Field Study In their third year, schedule allowing, students are permitted to accept observance-ships and/or positions as assistants with professional theater productions in New York or at nearby regional theaters. The student participation/involvement is intended to be sustained, so that the evolution of the design, from focus to public performances, can be seen.

[ DRAM 428b, Auditory Culture How do we listen to the world around us, and how does that awareness inform our sound practice? This course is a deep dive into our own listening practices, tendencies, and habits. Through readings, writing, soundwalks, and various sonic studies, we reflect on our work and expand our knowledge as designers and creatives. Open to non-Design and non-Drama students with prior permission of the instructor; preference given to theater, music, and art majors. Enrollment limited to twelve. Two hours a week. Not offered in 2023–2024]

[ DRAM 440b, The World of the Play Offered to students in Projection Design and open to other students by permission of the instructor. See description under Directing. Not offered in 2023–2024]

DRAM 444a/b, Professional Development Limited to graduating design students and focused on thesis development as well as the review of student portfolios and internet-based materials for professional promotion. Professional materials review and thesis support are individual, one hour a week by appointment. Wendall K. Harrington and Shawn Boyle

DRAM 468a/b, Programming in Sound Design The student who desires to pursue a specialized course of study in the area of Sound Design may elect an independent study. A proposal might focus on a guided research project, artistic exploration, or advanced audio technology. Proposals must be submitted in writing, and program approval must be obtained prior to enrollment for credit. Subsequent to enrollment, the student must meet with the project adviser to plan an appropriate course of action and discuss assessment. Credit is awarded based on the project adviser’s recommendation in consultation with any other assigned advisers/tutors. Regular meetings are scheduled to track progress. Konrad Kaczmarek

DRAM 489a/b, Costume Seminar See description under Technical Design and Production.

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Academic Credit & Letters of Support

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Once you secure your experience, you may find the employer needs additional information to finalize your employment or, if applicable, secure your work visa. See below for how OCS can help when an employer requests details about academic credit or a letter of support for a U.S. based or international internship.

NOTE : If you need verification of your enrollment, that must go through the University Registrar’s Office . The process is simple, visit the Registrar’s website and click the “Verifications” link on the right for instructions. Please plan ahead and allow up to 5 business days for processing.

Academic Credit Letters

In some instances, organizations may ask that interns receive academic credit as a form of compensation for their work. Yale College has a policy that  may allow a student to apply their summer experience toward credit for independent study at Yale. Upon request, the Office of Career Strategy is able to provide a letter explaining this policy to an employer. The majority of organizations have accepted this policy letter without reservation.

This policy is not unique to Yale; it is shared by many other institutions and broadly accepted across multiple industries.

This letter states that a Yale College sophomore, junior, or senior whose previous academic record is satisfactory may be eligible to undertake an Independent Study for course credit, for which the student’s internship experience serves as a foundation for research, higher level course discussion, and relevant term projects. Students who participate in an internship during the summer or while on leave of absence from Yale College may subsequently enroll in an Independent Study course. That course must be approved by the relevant DUS, must be taken during the very next term of enrollment in Yale College, and cannot exceed the number of independent study courses allowed within that term or during their time at Yale.

Furthermore, the letter clarifies expectations that students and internship sponsors understand that certain criteria must apply in order for the intern to not be considered an employee under the  Fair Labor Standards Act  and therefore not required to be compensated for the hours worked.

Click here to Request a Credit Letter

Prac 471/472 (fieldwork practicum analysis).

Yale College recognizes that experiential learning is a valued and integral part of the Yale College academic experience, enabling students to transition from the classroom into their post-graduate professional careers. This experience is acquired through a variety of means, including but not limited to internships, volunteer opportunities, independent projects, and research opportunities. Some employers require students to demonstrate that the work or internship experience is related to their academic major, and some students want to demonstrate to future employers that they have done field work. PRAC 471/472 are graded pass/fail courses that allow a student to receive credit for the application of summer experience toward this structured curricular engagement.

• All Yale College students who wish to enroll in one of the PRAC courses must have completed the Project Proposal Form .
• Qualifying fieldwork experiences must last a minimum of four consecutive weeks.
• PRAC 471 is offered for the Fall term; PRAC 472 is offered in the Spring. Interested students should enroll in the PRAC course most nearly following their fieldwork experience.
• U.S. Citizens or U.S. Permanent Residents : Your Project Proposal Form will be reviewed by both DUS and Practicum faculty for approval and acceptance into the next available Practicum.
• International Students : Once you complete the project proposal, please submit the Yale College Student CPT Request Form .
• Students on leave of absence : term-time fieldwork experience can be associated with a PRAC course pursued within the first term of re-enrollment.

International Internships: Letters of Support

International employers may ask the intern for a letter of support from their school stating that the student has an internship with the organization during the summer academic holiday. Others are more specific; for example, employers in France ask interns for a convention de stage  signed by the employer, the intern, and Yale. If any of these documents are required of you, please  contact OCS .

NOTE : If you need verification of your enrollment that must go through the University Registrar’s Office . The process is simple, visit the Registrar’s website and click the “Verifications” link on the right for instructions. Please plan ahead and allow up to 5 business days for processing.

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National Council on the Arts, March 27, 2024: Panelists Biographies

Annie burridge general director & ceo, austin opera.

Annie Burridge was named general director and CEO of Austin Opera in October 2016. Upon arrival, she led the development of the company’s new strategic plan centered on artistic growth, innovation, and civic engagement. She launched a new artistic initiative—Opera ATX—bringing groundbreaking artists to unexpected and unique venues throughout Austin; appointed the company’s first Curator of Hispanic and Latinx Programming funded through the creation of the Butler Fund for Spanish Programming; established a new model for co-production partnerships; secured four national innovation grants totaling $800,000; established numerous community partnerships including the Consulate General of Mexico in Austin; and tripled the company’s endowment funds.   Burridge joined Austin Opera following a nine-year tenure at Opera Philadelphia, where she most recently served as managing director. She holds a graduate certificate in nonprofit administration from the University of Pennsylvania and a MM in Voice Performance and a MM in Opera Studies from the New England Conservatory. She graduated the valedictorian of the College of Arts and Architecture at Penn State University, where she earned a BM in Voice Performance with a minor in business administration. Burridge is an alumnus of Wharton’s Women’s Executive Leadership program and OPERA America’s Leadership Intensive program. She was a 2017 Nonprofit Leadership Fellow at the Aspen Institute.

Kelvin Dinkins, Jr. Executive Director, American Repertory Theater

Kelvin Dinkins, Jr. is the executive director of American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) at Harvard University. Dinkins joins A.R.T. following his roles as assistant dean and assistant professor adjunct in theater management at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University and the general manager of Yale Repertory Theatre. Prior to Yale, Dinkins served as general manager of Two River Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey, where he produced over 25 productions and two original cast albums, including Be More Chill . Dinkins currently serves on the board of directors for the League of Resident Theatres (LORT) and the board of trustees for the Theatre Communications Group (TCG). Dinkins has served as the chair of the LORT Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Committee since 2016. Dinkins is a coordinator for the LORT-Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival ASPIRE Fellows program supporting the development of future theatre industry leaders. Dinkins developed his passion for theater management and producing while an undergraduate at Princeton University where he received his AB degree in English and received a certificate in theatre and dance from the Lewis Center for the Arts. He earned his MFA in Theatre Management and Producing from Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

Kerry Lee Co-Artistic Director, Atlanta Chinese Dance Company

Kerry Lee is the co-artistic director of the Atlanta Chinese Dance Company, where she began her dance journey under the direction of her mother, Hwee-Eng Lee, while also immersing herself in the pre-professional ballet world. After graduating from Stanford University with an engineering degree, she followed her heart into the professional dance world in New York City. As a traditional Chinese and modern/contemporary dancer, she toured nationally and internationally with the Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company, H.T. Chen & Dancers, Dance China NY, and gloATL before returning home to co-lead the Atlanta Chinese Dance Company with her mother. For many years, Lee worked at the intersection of the arts and activism on staff at Alternate ROOTS (a regional arts service organization based in the South), where she is still a longtime member. She has also been politically active in the Asian American community in Georgia. These life-changing experiences have been instrumental in propelling her toward addressing social justice issues and sharing rarely told Chinese-American stories through Chinese dance choreography. Her work has been discussed in China’s Beijing Dance Academy Forum as an example of innovative Chinese dance choreography reflecting Chinese diaspora communities and performed at the national Dance/USA conference. Lee enjoys sharing Chinese dance and Chinese American stories in spaces traditionally dominated by western aesthetics. She has created dances, set work, and taught workshops/residencies for university dance programs, performing arts high schools, and ballet schools in Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia. Kerry has served as a grant panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts (Our Town) and was a Dance/USA Institute for Leadership Training mentee (mentored by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar).

Laura Penn Executive Director, Stage Directors and Choreographers Society; Labor Activist; PCAH member

Laura Penn has been executive director of Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC) since 2008. Under her leadership the union’s membership has grown over 100 percent, a result of her work expanding SDC’s jurisdictions, leading bold and successful negotiations, and furthering its Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion initiatives and political engagement. She serves on the general board of the Department for Professional Employees, AFL-CIO (DPE) and is an active member of DPE's Arts and Entertainment and Media Industry Coordinating Committee. She is co-chair of the Coalition of Broadway Unions and Guilds, the first woman to hold a leadership position with this coalition of 18 influential unions representing workers on Broadway. Penn serves on the Tony Awards Administration Committee and is a Tony Voter. She served as a panelist for the New York State Council for the Arts, for more than a decade was a site evaluator for the National Endowment for the Arts, was Vice President of the League of Resident Theatres, and was two-term chair of the Seattle Arts Commission. Recognized with Seattle’s Distinguished Citizen Medal, she is an advocate for civic dialogue and public participation and has been dedicated throughout her career to the idea that artistic excellence and community engagement are intrinsically connected. Penn previously served as an arts executive for Intiman Theatre and Seattle Repertory Theatre and began her career at Washington, DC’s Arena Stage, Living Stage Theatre Company. Penn currently teaches Labor Relations in the graduate program at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale and is a member of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.

Christy Bolingbroke Executive/Artistic Director, National Center for Choreography – Akron

As the founding executive and artistic director for the National Center for Choreography in Akron, Ohio (NCCAkron), Christy Bolingbroke is responsible for setting the curatorial vision and sustainable business model to foster research and development in dance. Previously, she served as the deputy director for advancement at ODC in San Francisco, overseeing curation and performance programming as well as marketing and development organization-wide. A key aspect of her position included managing a unique three-year artist-in-residence program for dance artists; guiding and advising them in all aspects of creative development and administration. Prior to ODC, she was the director of marketing at the Mark Morris Dance Group in Brooklyn. Bolingbroke earned a BA in Dance from the University of California, Los Angeles; an MA in Performance Curation from Wesleyan University; and is a graduate of the Arts Management Fellowship program at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. She is a former board president of the Dance Resource Center of Greater Los Angeles; a founding member of Emerging Leaders for New York Arts; a retired board member of California Presenters; a consulting advisor for the Bloomberg Philanthropies Arts Innovation Management initiative; and a part of the Akron Civic Commons. Bolingbroke curated the 2020 American Dance Platform at The Joyce Theater, and in 2017, DANCE Magazine named her among the national list of most influential people in dance today.

Leslie Ishii Artistic Director, Perseverance Theatre

Leslie Ishii, artistic director of Perseverance Theatre (PT), has directed at PT and throughout the U.S. at regional and university theater; at Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF): API 2x2 Lab New Works Residency, Founder/Co-Producer, Dramaturgy, FAIR Assistant Director Program Recipient and co- facilitation of OSF’s E/D/I/A Initiative with artEquity; Native Voices at the Autry in Dramaturgy, and many more. As an actor, Ishii has worked throughout the regional theater and with legacy theaters of color, on Broadway, and in film and television. She is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including a United States Artist Fellowship, 2022-23; SDCF Zelda Fichandler Directors Award Finalist, 2021; Los Angeles Women’s Theatre Integrity Award; NEA Grant Panelist; National Theatre Conference Member; Stage Directors and Choreographers’ Union E/D/I Standout Moments, 2016, 2017; Doris Duke Charitable Foundation National Theatre Grant Recipient; James P. Shannon Leadership Institute; Los Angeles County Teachers Making A Difference Award.

Blake-Anthony Johnson President & CEO, Chicago Sinfonietta

Noted as a “business heavyweight” by Crain’s Chicago Business , arts executive Blake-Anthony Johnson has, throughout his career, extended the artistic, commercial, and technological boundaries of what an orchestra can be in the 21st century through creative leadership, commitment to innovation, and progressive vision. With a focus on community-centric, multi-disciplinary, and educational initiatives that enable cultural institutions to provide equitable access and public service to all, Johnson has been universally recognized and applauded for his civic engagement and transformational leadership. He is the first African American executive to guide a nationally renowned orchestra and serves on numerous boards and panels throughout the country by invitation. Johnson was named a 2022 Top 30 Professionals of the Year by MusicalAmerica.com, Chicago Tribune ’s 2022 Chicagoan of the Year in Classical Music, and a member of Crain’s Chicago Business magazine’s Class of 2022 40 Under 40. Since May 2020, Johnson has served as chief executive officer of the award-winning Chicago Sinfonietta, an acclaimed cultural leader in the field and powerful champion of diversity, equity, and inclusion. He was appointed president and CEO in April 2022 and serves as chairman of the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events Council.

Annalisa Dias Independent artist, theater director, playwright

Annalisa Dias is a Goan American transdisciplinary artist, community organizer, and award-winning theater-maker working at the intersection of racial justice and care for the earth. She is director of artistic partnerships and innovation at Baltimore Center Stage (BCS) and a co-founder of Groundwater Arts.

Prior to joining BCS, Dias was a producing playwright and acting creative producer with The Welders, a DC playwright's collective, and a co-founder of the DC Coalition for Theatre & Social Justice. Dias’s work has been produced or developed by arts institutions across the United States and United Kingdom, and her artistic work has taken her to South Africa, India, Malawi, Arctic Norway, and more. Dias frequently teaches theater of the oppressed and decolonization workshops and is a sought-after speaker about race, identity, and performance.

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Current post-doctoral fellows.

Christy Monet (Brandly), September 2023 – August 2024 Dr. Monet Brandly is a political scientist and Slavicist specializing in intellectual history as viewed from the perspectives of the history of political thought and literary studies. She conducts research and teaches in the fields of political theory, literature, and history, with a focus on Russophone political thought and its engagements with empire, liberalism, and American culture over the last two centuries. She earned her Ph.D. in both Political Science and Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Chicago in 2023. She also holds an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Chicago, as well as a B.A. in Political Science from St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Her current book project on the family novel in Imperial Russia explores the ways in which the development of liberal thought in 19th-century Russia created space for the reimagining of both the form of the family and its role in the political—a reimagining in stark contrast to the eventual removal of the family from the political in Western liberal thought. This research is based, in part, on research undertaken in both Moscow and St. Petersburg in the archives of the Russian State Library and the Pushkin House, respectively. Her doctoral dissertation and current book project have been supported by an Alfa Fellowship, a University of Chicago Harper Dissertation-Year Fellowship, an Institute for Humane Studies Publication Accelerator Grant, and a Princeton University Press Book Proposal Grant. This is her first post-doctoral academic appointment, although she previously worked for the Moscow-based publishing house Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (NLO) as an editorial assistant and translator during her graduate studies.

Mina Magda, September 2023 – August 2024 Dr. Magda is a scholar of Russian literature, visual art, and performance spanning the long nineteenth century and early Soviet period. Her interdisciplinary research centers politics of racial representation, gendered labor, and colonial culture. Becoming Modern: Negrophilia, Russophilia, and the Making of Modernist Paris, her current book project, examines the aesthetic interplay among modernists of the Russian and Black diasporas in Paris—namely, Josephine Baker and the Ballets Russes—the visual technologies of race-making that framed their careers, and their shared imbrication in the histories of celebrity and coloniality. She demonstrates how the comparison between Baker and the Ballets Russes helps us think of racial formation as a network of political, aesthetic, and commercial negotiations through which we can examine the limits and relational contingencies of racial self-determination, and ask at what cost conceptions of modern subjecthood were afforded. Magda received her PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University in 2023 and holds an MA in Russian and Slavic Studies from New York University. Her doctoral dissertation was supported by fellowships at the Houghton Library and Beinecke Library and the MacMillan International Dissertation Research Fellowship.

Anastasiia Vlasenko, September 2022-August 2023 Dr. Vlasenko is a postdoctoral fellow who studies electoral politics and democratization with specialization in politics of Ukraine and Russia. Her monograph project, ‘The Electoral Effects of Decentralization: Evidence from Ukraine’ investigates how decentralization reform affects electoral mobilization and diversity in a weakly institutionalized democracy. Vlasenko is particularly interested in transitional period reforms, propaganda, legislative politics, and forecasting. Her research has been published in the Journal of Politics.  She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at Florida State University in 2022, M.A. in Political Science from Florida State University in 2018, M.A. in International Relations from New York University in 2016, and M.Sc. in European Affairs from Lund University in 2013, and B.A. in Political Science from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in 2011. In 2020-2021, she worked at Hertie School in Berlin as a visiting researcher. In 2014-2016, Vlasenko was a Fulbright scholar at New York University. At Florida State University, she taught courses on comparative politics and post-Soviet studies.

Margarita Kuleva, December 2022-November 2023 Dr. Kuleva is a sociologist of culture, interested in exploring social inequalities in the art world and cultural industries in Russia and the UK. Primarily, she works as an ethnographer to discover the ‘behind the scenes’ of cultural institutions to give greater visibility to the invisible workers of culture. Kuleva received her PhD in art sociology from the National Research University Higher School of Economics in collaboration with Bielefeld University in 2019. The dissertation entailed a comparative study of the careers and professional identities of young cultural workers in visual art sectors in Moscow, St Petersburg and London. Based on more than 70 in-depth interviews, it was one of the first systematic studies of post-Soviet creative labour. Some findings from these studies were recently presented in journal publications including  Cultural Studies  (2018) and  International Journal of Cultural Studies  (2019), as well as  European Journal of Cultural Studies  (2022). Her current research project,  The Right to Be Creative , focuses on hidden political struggles at contemporary Russian cultural institutions. Dr. Kuleva previously worked at National Research University Higher School of Economics as an Associate Professor and held the position of Chair of the Department of Design and Contemporary Art in St Petersburg. In 2019-2020, Kuleva was a fellow of the Center for Art, Design and Social Research (Boston, Massachusetts). As a researcher, artist, and curator, she has collaborated with a number of Russian and international cultural institutions, including Manifesta Biennale, Pushkin House in London, Boston Center for the Arts, Garage MoCA, Goethe Institute, Helsinki Art Museum, Street Art Museum, Ural Industrial Biennale and New Holland St. Petersburg.

Past Post-Doctoral Fellows

Nikolay Erofeev, March 2022-May 2022

Dr. Erofeev is an architectural historian whose work focuses on socialist architecture and urban planning. His monograph project, ‘Architecture and housing in the Comecon’ looks at architecture and urbanisation patterns produced by global socialism. Combining in-depth scrutiny of the design of the built environment with an analysis of the everyday processes of subject-making that shaped the socialist project in Mongolia, the project aims to provide a new understanding of the urban and domestic spaces produced in the Global South. Erofeev received his D.Phil (PhD) in History from the University of Oxford in 2020 where he was a Hill Foundation Scholar and his specialist degree (M.A.) in the History of Art from the Moscow State University in 2014. His doctoral project discussed the design and production of prefabricated mass housing in the Soviet Union and argued the architectural story of this understudied ‘bureaucratic modernism’ represents a much more creative and influential development in the history of modern architecture as a whole. Erofeev had academic appointments at Manchester Metropolitan University where he was teaching Master of Architecture dissertations. Erofeev is currently conducting research at the University of Basel as a postdoctoral fellow supported by the Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship.

Jennifer Flaherty, September 2020-August 2021

Dr. Flaherty is a postdoctoral fellow specializing in nineteenth- and twentieth- century Russian literature, culture and intellectual history, with current research interests in Hegel’s influence on Russian thought as well as labor theory. Her book project on representations of peasants investigates how the stylistic innovations of nineteenth-century Russian literature express the tensions of modernity that lie at the heart of its agrarian myth. She received her Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of California at Berkeley in 2019, her M.A. in Humanities from the University of Chicago in 2010, and her B.A. in Philosophy from Appalachian State University in North Carolina. She’s had academic appointments as a visiting assistant professor in the department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the College of William of Mary, and as a lecturer at in the Slavic department at UC Berkeley. Flaherty has conducted research as an American Councils Fellow in Moscow and with Harvard’s Institute for World Literature. Her doctoral dissertation received support from UC Berkeley’s Townsend Center for Humanities. She has a forthcoming article in The Russian Review and has published in Tolstoy Studies Journal and PMLA.

Nataliia Laas, September 2022-August 2023 Dr. Laas specializes in political economy, consumer society, gender, the history of the social sciences, and environmental history in the Soviet Union. She currently works on a book manuscript, provisionally titled A Soviet Consumer Republic: Economic Citizenship and the Economy of Waste in the Post-WWII Soviet Union. This project departs from the standard economy-of-shortages narrative and offers a different dimension, an “economy of waste,” to describe Soviet consumption. It argues that after World War II and especially with the onset of Cold War competition with the West, in addition to periodic shortages the Soviet state regularly confronted a new challenge: glutted markets, overproducing factories, and excess commodities. Unlike shortages that were often vindicated by the official Bolshevik ideology as the people’s sacrifice on the road to the country’s industrialization and economic growth, excess and waste were endemic to the malfunctioning of a command economy but far more difficult for authorities to explain and justify. By focusing on the emergence of socialist market research and consumer studies, the book explores how the economy of waste reshaped relationships between the state and its citizens. Laas received her PhD in History from Brandeis University in 2022. Her doctoral dissertation was supported by a Harriman Institute Carnegie Research Grant and a Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship from Brandeis, among others.

Emily Laskin, September 2022-August 2023

Dr. Laskin specializes in the literature of Central Asia, working extensively in Russian and Persian. Her current book project,  No Man’s Land: The Geopoetics of Modern Central Asia , focuses on the literature of the so-called Great Game, the Russo-British rivalry for influence in Central Asia, putting Russian and British imperial writing on Central Asia in dialogue with contemporaneous Persian literature published across the region, from Kabul, to Bukhara, to Istanbul. Laskin’s recent work on the literature of the Great Game appears in  Novel: A Forum on Fiction , and she is an editor of the forthcoming volume  Tulips in Bloom: An Anthology of Modern Central Asian Literature . She received her Ph.D. in 2021 in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and also holds an M.A. in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies from Columbia University. Her doctoral dissertation was supported by a Mellon/ACLS fellowship and a Berkeley Dean’s Fund grant for archival research in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Vladimir Ryzhkovskyi, November 2020-October 2021

Dr. Ryzhkovskyi studied Russian, Soviet and East European history in Ukraine, Russia, and the US, where he recently earned a PhD from Georgetown University. By foregrounding the link between empire, culture, and knowledge, Ryzhkovskyi’s research probes the place of Russia and the Soviet Union within global history, particularly in relation to forms of Western imperialism and colonialism. His current book project, Soviet Occidentalism: Medieval Studies and the Restructuring of Imperial Knowledge in Twentieth-Century Russia, explores the twentieth-century history of medieval studies in late imperial and Soviet Russia as a model for demonstrating the crucial importance of Soviet appropriation of Western culture and knowledge in the post-revolutionary reconstituting and maintaining the empire following 1917. In addition to pursuing the imperial and postcolonial theme in the history of Soviet modernity, Ryzhkovskyi has published articles and essays on the history of late imperial and Soviet education, the history of late Soviet intelligentsia, and Soviet philosophy. A volume of unpublished writings by the Soviet historian and philosopher Boris Porshnev, co-edited with Artemy Magun, is forthcoming from the European University Press in 2021.

Delgerjargal Uvsh, November 2020-October 2021

Dr. Uvsh received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2020. She conducts research and teaches primarily in the field of comparative politics, with a focus on post-Soviet politics, the political economy of natural-resource dependence, institutional and regime change, and research methods. Using Russia as a critical case, Delgerjargal’s book project, “Reversal of the Resource Curse? Negative Revenue Shocks and Development in Russia and Beyond,” develops a theory of when and how declines in natural-resource revenue (negative revenue shocks) incentivize political elites to support private business activity and reverse the “resource curse.” Delgerjargal expanded her interest in the relationship between natural resources and institutional changes in a forthcoming book chapter, where she explores the short-term effects of negative revenue shocks on political regimes. Another extension, published in Land Use Policy , analyzes novel satellite data on forest-cover change in western Russian regions and shows that the dynamics of forest growth and deforestation have been different in the first versus the second decade of Russia’s transition. You can read more about Delgerjargal’s work at www.delgerjargaluvsh.com .

Sasha de Vogel, September 2021-August 2022

Dr. de Vogel studies the politics of authoritarian regimes and collective action, particularly in Russia and the post-Soviet region. Her research examines when and why autocratic regimes promise concessions to protestors, how these promises affect mobilization and their impact on policies. Her research underscores that reneging, or deliberately failing to implement concessions as promised, is a fundamental strategic dimension of concessions. Her book project focuses on protest campaigns against the Moscow City government about policy-related grievances in the mid-2010s. During this period, more protest campaigns were promised a concession than experienced a detention, yet these concessions rarely resolved protesters’ grievances. Other research interests include comparative politics, authoritarian institutions, repression, authoritarian responsiveness and urban politics. Sasha received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan in 2021, and also holds an MA in Russian, Eastern European and Eurasian Regional Studies and a BA in Slavic Studies from Columbia University. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation/Harriman Institute, among others.