91¿´Æ¬

Your vision. Your voice.
Your vision. Your voice.

The Arts

As 91¿´Æ¬ continues to grow, our first Master of Fine Arts in Performance Creation fits right in with our mission to deliver highly-skilled graduates with professional education steeped in the liberal arts. Our first arts offering, in partnership with Touchstone Theatre, is a unique opportunity for artists to hone their vision and see their work through from artistic impulse to realization on stage. Diverse cohorts of performers, designers, choreographers, directors, and writers will embark on this full-time, two year program that is part arts incubator, part apprenticeship. Our artists will create original solo and ensemble performance in both production and lab settings, teach theatre in the community, get hands-on experience in arts administration and production, and perform internationally.

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Learn from pioneers in ensemble theatre.

Students will be taught by award-winning, working professionals—practicing artists who know the craft from daily engagement with performance creation. The Touchstone Theatre Ensemble has been a leader in the field of ensemble theatre, focusing its energies on the development of new original performances and community-based projects for nearly 40 years.

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Earn a terminal degree in the arts steeped in both the practical and the theoretical.

Jack of all trades?

How about master of all. Hands-on arts administration, production, and teaching experience.

2:1

Faculty-student ratio. Taught by award-winning, working professionals.

James Jordan, MFA Program Director

James Jordan, MFA has called Touchstone Theatre his artistic home for its last thirteen seasons. He has helped produce over seventy productions since arriving at Touchstone, serving in multiple capacities including director, designer, composer, actor, and playwright. Some of James’s most notable contributions were his leadership as Project Director for Touchstone’s last two community-based productions A Resting Place and Journey from the East and his original series of musical comedies under The Pan Show title, which chronicles the misadventures of the Greek God Pan as he is placed into modern day America, co-written with Touchstone Ensemble Affiliate Christopher Shorr.

Christopher Shorr, Associate Professor

Christopher Shorr, MFA directs the Theatre Program on campus, is the Artistic Director of the 91¿´Æ¬ Theatre Company and is a member of the Touchstone Theatre company. Primarily a stage director and playwright, Shorr also works as a set designer and composer for theatre. Through all of his work, he strives to prevent students, audiences, collaborators, and himself from succumbing to complacency. He is particularly interested in the creation of new theatre pieces and in the aggressive re-working of classic texts.