Training

In your first year, we are primarily concerned with an invigorating mix of large playful release and minutely and rigorously observed behaviors.

You spend time getting to know how your body (including your voice), imagination, and new capacity for expression are released through addressing tension/muscular holding and deepening your curiosity.

 Acting teacher Richard Feldman defines the challenge:

There are no ready formulas for acting; it is an art, not a science. The actors' talent and creativity and how and when it blossoms and flourishes is ultimately mysterious. Acting, however, is a craft as well as an art. The actor can acquire tools and practice techniques that can strengthen or deepen their instincts, imagination and creativity; technique serves the imagination.

The second year of training represents the transition from introducing techniques to their application. Hopefully, we will have (sensitively) challenged the habits you brought into school as First Year students, and now you can work together as an ensemble with a shared vocabulary. Your skills and techniques are brought to a new level. There's an increased emphasis on individual tutorial work, specialized dialect work, and coaching in connection with productions. You also begin working with and in front of the camera.

This is a busy and intense year, but full of opportunity and experience, much of it fully integrated with your production and project work - each of which is selected with the growth of your particular cohort in mind.

In the final year of training, we work to tie together all the strands of your journey to prepare you to enter the professional world. Important classes include working with some of the best teachers in the industry to help you take charge of your career and learn how to audition and work in theater, film and television.

There are workshops to broaden your sense of collaboration, including a unique Collaboration Class, taught in tandem by Oskar Eustis and Suzan-Lori Parks. You also have the opportunity to work on-camera with both professionals as and students from NYU Grad Film. All this alongside performing in season of plays in our world-class theatre spaces selected to feature your unique cohort. Your time ends with a final showcase for industry professionals that includes filmed work and live performances.

The arc of production at the Grad Acting Program is organized over three years in a variety of projects and productions that build and evolve your ability to master different texts, different experiences, and different collaborators on an evolutionary route towards entering the professional arena as an actor prepared--and open to--any eventuality and experience. Faculty members support these productions with their involvement in your progress at rehearsals; they will both work with you directly on these productions and/or support the professional who come to work at Grad Acting.

The first year concentrates on a variety of projects performed in the classroom; sometimes presented for the school, sometimes not. You are immediately thrown headfirst into The Ensemble Project, designed to establish a foundation of collaboration and ensemble building in your cohort. In the second semester of your first year, the Rehearsal Into Production Project will move you towards the next stage of understanding the rehearsal process and beginning to take the tools learned in your first semester and put them into practice in a production setting. Finally, the year ends with a Shakespeare project, usually directed by a faculty member or a guest artist well-versed, as it were, in the Bard.

The second year brings some of these ideas into our smaller performance spaces and focuses largely on bringing elements of your classwork to bear on the demands of a role in production. The class is usually split into two separate, concurrent productions, which helps provide an equity of roles for everyone in the ensemble. There will be a Realism slot--then, one of our favorite events, a Cabaret, directed by your singing teacher, Deb Lapidus; this allows you to communicate thoughts and feelings via song. Everyone then works together on an ambitious yearly project that splits the ensemble into two separate productions played concurrently in two connected spaces. Finally, the company splits into two separate productions that focus on heightened language. For some of these productions (except the Cabaret), there may be shared casting, where you might be asked to share a major role or play several different parts.

The third year productions move you towards your professional career. The season itself reflects a varied repertory: classical plays (often including Shakespeare), contemporary plays, recent successes from Broadway or Off-Broadway (which offer an opportunity to delve into the work of a playwright whom you might audition for in the “real world”), and the culmination of the new play project developed at the end of your second year. All of these production are directed by artists who are working professionals, with a wide range of experience and expertise. An important aspect of your final year is "Freeplay" which allows you to conceive, produce, write and/or act in your own performance piece; we have had up to a dozen such projects for each Freeplay season. Your production year culminates in your showcase presentations, which give you the opportunity to present your talents live in New York and digitally to professional agents, casting directors and producers.

An innovative segment where every aspect of the student's curriculum includes an investigation about working in and the aesthetics of film.

NYU Grad Acting is at the epicenter of the greatest and most vibrant campus in the world: New York City. For an observational point of view, the city provides so much sheer life for our students: the greatest and most diverse variety of people in this country.

From a cultural point of view, New York City is unparalleled. Our students regularly attend productions on Broadway, off-Broadway, off-off-Broadway and the latest Hollywood and independent films. (Many of these viewing opportunities are offered to us free, or at reduced rates, often thanks to our alumni who are appearing in them.) In addition, the world’s greatest museums, galleries, restaurants, and libraries are used for research and field trips; they are only a brief walk or a subway ride away. Greenwich Village itself provides many bookstores, record stores and video stores to buy or rent material for class.

We pride ourselves on making major artists accessible to our students. Every year, guest speakers give special talks to our students. These artists have included our finest actors: James Earl Jones, Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, John Lithgow, Nathan Lane, Audra McDonald, Rosemary Harris, John Turturro, Diane Wiest, Patti LuPone, William Jackson Harper, Arian Moayed, Nikiya Mathis, April Matthis, Miriam Silverman, Anne Kauffman, and Andre Braugher as well as visiting artists from around the world: Alan Rickman, Ian McKellen, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, Hugo Weaving and many more. Major directors such as Kenny Leon, Declan Donnellan, and Richard Eyre have come to speak, as well as playwrights such as Suzan-Lori Parks and Tony Kushner. Special workshops, unique to our students, have been offered by actors and directors such as Liev Schreiber and Maria Aitken. No other school can offer such a dazzling array of visiting artists, and on such an intimate and tactile level.

While an important theme of the program is that theatre takes place wherever there are people to gather around, New York City still offers the highest concentration of resources for students to work and play. There is no other playground (or studyground) like it in the world, and our faculty is here to make sure your education exploits every ounce of the city’s tremendous creative energy.

Your very first project as a class immediately throws you headfirst into a world that generates a deeply connected and communicative ensemble while working outside everyone's area of familiarity in some form.

Grad Acting is fortunate to be housed along with one of the great films schools in the country. Each year our graduating students collabortate with the next generation of artists on short films that feature and are often written specifically for our actors.

In Year 3, Grad Acting students work with Public Theater Artistic Director Oskar Eustis and Master Writer Chair Suzan-Lori Parks in a collaboration class with NYU Graduate Dramatic Writing and Design Students along with emerging professional directors. This class focuses on the collaborative process of developing new work and the way great collaboration can lead to better scripts.