This three-year graduate program trains you to become an artist-practitioner with mastery of the integration of diverse elements of theatrical technique and expression. It is a considered the terminal degree for practitioners in our discipline. Graduates are qualified to continue working as professionals or to pursue tenure-track positions in higher education. The aim of the program is to provide students with performance skills, a capacity for critical analysis, and practical experiences to develop within them a personal artistic performance process. By exploring new processes and challenging old ones, students gain a deeper understanding of themselves and their strengths and skills in diverse acting styles. The work also challenges them as actors to communicate and engage with audiences.<br><br>The acting student will experience an intense first-year cohort experience with other MFA graduate students that will focus on techniques and principles in the service of communicating story and character through dramatic action and concept. In that year the acting students will investigate theory and criticism of acting methods. In the second two years of the MFA program, students take some courses with upper-division BFA acting students and often serve as teaching assistants to professors in specific areas of interest such as acting, directing, voice and speech, movement, history, and theory. The intense study and teaching in these areas serves to develop a personal philosophy and pedagogy of acting.