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DEPARTMENT OF THEATER, DANCE, AND PERFORMANCE STUDIES

The Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley is a unit of the College of Letters and Science, the largest of the fourteen colleges and professional schools on the Berkeley campus. In our Department, we understand performance to be a mode of critical inquiry, a means of a creative expression, and a vehicle for public engagement. Located within the School of the Arts and Humanities at one of the world's great universities, the faculty, staff, and students in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies--and in the allied Ph.D. in Performance Studies--pursue a wide spectrum of research and production activities. We see performance as an interdiscplinary form, exploring verbal, visual, spatial, and embodied registers of experience. We see performance as a transnational cultural form, exploring the politics and poetics of social life in all parts of the world. We see performance as a public forum for contemporary ideas, allowing us to test and debate the central concerns of our time in a space that is at once critical, emotional, and collective. The faculty is nationally and internationally known both for its scholarly research and for its artistic work in design, directing, choreography, acting, and experimental performance. Our curriculum ranges from the classics to the contemporary; it cuts across theatrical, dance, and visual art forms; it spans all corners of the globe, using the site of performance to deepen UC Berkeley's critical education in the humanities. Indeed, at a time when scholars and educators call for more cross-disciplinary intellectual collaboration and project-based learning in higher education, we take pride in our daily commitment to collaboration and to the kind of rigorously critical, team-based projects we develop with our students, staff, and faculty, both in the classroom and in our production season. We offer a major and a minor in Theater and Performance Studies as well as in Dance and Performance Studies; we also administer the Ph.D. in Performance Studies. Each year, the Department presents between four and six productions in our Main Stage Season, as well as a Workshop Season of eight to fourteen smaller productions. Throughout the year, we sponsor a variety of symposia, visiting lectures, master classes, and a "Making Theater" series, featuring luminaries in the fields of theater, dance, television, and performance studies.