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Lighting design has the powerful ability to shape the experience of an audience. Its practice incorporates elements of artistry and craft, and should interest those working in all aspects of visual and performing arts. In addition to hands-on work with theatrical lighting equipment in and outside of class, awareness of light, play analysis and conceptualization, color, angle, composition and focus are explored in class demonstrations and in a series of individual and group projects.

“Music is something that you can’t see, and painting is something that you can’t hear...so they balance each other’.” (1)

In this 7-week course, we’ll explore a variety of approaches to improvised scene work, focusing on techniques beyond the Upright Citizens Brigade paradigm. Emphasizing Chicago-style improv, we’ll shift away from a strict ‘Game’ focus and instead prioritize relationship and character.

Get ready to jump in, take risks, and perform hundreds of scenes as you sharpen your skills and expand your improv toolkit. And of course, we’ll top it all off with a final class show where anything can happen!

Historical Dress: The Park-McCullough Project Fall ‘25

Working in collaboration with the local Park-McCullough Historic Governor’s Mansion, students will create a new archive of the historic dress collection.

A sustainable design process with found clothing 

Every year, roughly 92 million tons of clothing end up in landfills. This course seeks to support students rescuing our cast-offs by upcycling fast fashion. Students will explore how to deconstruct garments, rethink their intention, and reconstruct them anew. 

How does one’s social positionality affect one’s status as a knower? Who is heard? Who is believed? This seven-week course is focused on questions of justice and power in relation to knowledge. We will engage with recent work in social epistemology—philosophical theories of belief and knowledge—with an emphasis on feminist epistemologies, anti-racist epistemologies, and epistemologies of resistance. These approaches stress that knowers are embodied, situated, embedded in communities, and have multiple, intersecting social identities.

Studio Practice is designed to offer each student a rigorous and immersive dance study experience. A deep-dive into practices of critical physicality, students will be supported in making direct connections across an abundance of dance forms that rearrange and blur the boundaries between traditional and emerging techniques. Studio Practice courses focus on the relationships between curiosity, desire, strength, effort, force, and presence, all while moving within the lineages and histories that inform the ways in which we create and encounter our dancing futures.

Studio Practice is designed to offer each student a rigorous and immersive dance study experience. A deep-dive into practices of critical physicality, students will be supported in making direct connections across an abundance of dance forms that rearrange and blur the boundaries between traditional and emerging techniques. Studio Practice courses focus on the relationships between curiosity, desire, strength, effort, force, and presence, all while moving within the lineages and histories that inform the ways in which we create and encounter our dancing futures.

Studio Practice is designed to offer each student a rigorous and immersive dance study experience. A deep-dive into practices of critical physicality, students will be supported in making direct connections across an abundance of dance forms that rearrange and blur the boundaries between traditional and emerging techniques. Studio Practice courses focus on the relationships between curiosity, desire, strength, effort, force, and presence, all while moving within the lineages and histories that inform the ways in which we create and encounter our dancing futures.

Studio Practice is designed to offer each student a rigorous and immersive dance study experience. A deep-dive into practices of critical physicality, students will be supported in making direct connections across an abundance of dance forms that rearrange and blur the boundaries between traditional and emerging techniques. Studio Practice courses focus on the relationships between curiosity, desire, strength, effort, force, and presence, all while moving within the lineages and histories that inform the ways in which we create and encounter our dancing futures.

Studio Practice is designed to offer each student a rigorous and immersive dance study experience. A deep-dive into practices of critical physicality, students will be supported in making direct connections across an abundance of dance forms that rearrange and blur the boundaries between traditional and emerging techniques. Studio Practice courses focus on the relationships between curiosity, desire, strength, effort, force, and presence, all while moving within the lineages and histories that inform the ways in which we create and encounter our dancing futures.

Modeling and Thinking in Rhino 8 is an introductory course to Computer-Aided Design (CAD) Modeling and how those models can be used in real-world applications. This course will explore the use of Rhino to create interactive models that represent imagined designs for manufacturing, architecture, and spatial sketching. Particular attention will be paid to how computer models relate to specific measurements, spaces, context, and future outputs. This course aims to build technical skills but will also consider aesthetics, functionality, and design concepts.

This is an advanced improvisation class for students from all disciplines. We will learn the concepts of complexity and advance our skills in pattern recognition, self-organization, emergent structuring, and development of movement, verbal, visual and design vocabularies. Collaborative processes will be explored to further different forms of creative practices, both to address an artistic practice and a dialogic practice.

This class will examine the current diplomacy and process of a new Convention for the United Nations on Conserving the River Deltas. We will hear from some of the lead partners on the project: The Transboundary Water In-Cooperation Network (TWIN), co-founded by CAPA and the Institute for Environmental Diplomacy and Security at the University of Vermont, and the African Centre for Climate Action and Rural Development (ACCARD) directed by Freeman Oluohor.