Where Theatre Meets Civic Engagement

As NYU Steinhardt’s Educational Theatre program celebrates 60 years, students are carrying its legacy of social engagement into the future.

For students in NYU Steinhardt’s Educational Theatre program, theatre is more than performance. It is research, activism, community-building, storytelling, and civic engagement—all rooted in the belief that art can create meaningful social change.

The Educational Theatre program, which recently celebrated its 60th anniversary, has long emphasized theatre as a tool for dialogue and transformation. Today, students continue that mission through projects that occupy shared spaces of scholarship, artistry, education, and social practice.

For Kylie Mukai, a master’s student in the Theatre for Social and Civic Engagement program, the path to NYU Steinhardt began with a childhood love of musical theatre at a summer camp near her hometown of Seattle. Later, while studying English and secondary education at Gonzaga University, she realized she wanted to combine teaching with theatre-making in a deeper way.

“I had this itch for theatre education,” says Mukai. “What drew me to NYU Steinhardt was that the Educational Theatre program blended so many things together: education, civic engagement, arts administration, research, and community work.”

That flexibility has become central to her experience at Steinhardt. In addition to coursework in theatre education, Mukai has taken classes in drama therapy, arts-based research, and performing arts administration. She also works as a teaching artist for Shakespeare To Go, the program’s touring theatre troupe, where she develops curriculum materials and leads workshops in New York City schools.

“That intersection between theatre and teaching is where my passion really lies,” says Mukai.

Mukai also presented at the recent Amplify & Ignite: A Symposium on Theatre for Social and Civic Engagement, jointly sponsored by Educational Theatre and the American Alliance for Theatre and Education (AATE) as part of the program’s anniversary weekend. Her presentation explored lived and unlived spaces through a narrative project that examined spectacle, memory, architecture, and loneliness among contemporary college students.

“The symposium reflected the breadth of conversations happening throughout the department, and it was wonderful seeing all these projects in conversation with each other,” says Mukai. “People were asking: What does it mean to be a student right now? What does community look like? How can theatre create connection?”

“It was really cool to see the work working,” says David Jarzen, a doctoral student in the Educational Theatre program who also attended the anniversary celebration and symposium. “I met alumni who are still creating, still researching, still coming back to the program decades later. It made the future feel tangible.”

Jarzen came to NYU after teaching voice and speech in London for five years. Though he originally trained in musical theatre, his work now focuses on decolonizing actor training and creating student-centered pedagogies.

At the symposium, Jarzen presented research connected to an upcoming article in Voice and Speech Review examining masculinity, critical consciousness, and bias in actor training. His work interrogates concepts like “neutral” and “natural” voice work, asking whose experiences traditional training models prioritize—and whose they exclude.

“My work is really about creating actor training spaces that aren’t just for skill acquisition; they’re spaces for liberation of self and society,” says Jarzen. “A lot of my work is translating between what a university says on paper and what the student experience actually is.”

According to Jarzen, that student-centered philosophy is embedded in the culture of Educational Theatre itself, with classes that combine ethnodrama, research methods, and collaborative creation while simultaneously fostering personal connection and community among students.

“So much of Steinhardt is about interconnectedness,” says Jarzen, who also works across departments on projects involving speech-language pathology and suicide prevention research. “You’re constantly building relationships with people from different disciplines and learning how those perspectives inform your own work.”

That interdisciplinary ethos is also what drew doctoral student Aubrey Mann to Educational Theatre after first enrolling at NYU Steinhardt for a master’s degree in Performing Arts Administration during the pandemic. A director by training, Mann initially sought tools to better advocate for artists and communities. But it was a summer study away program in Dublin that transformed her understanding of what theatre could be.

“It felt world-changing,” says Mann. “It was the first time I really experienced devised, community-centered theatre in practice.”

Since then, Mann has built a deeply interdisciplinary course of study at NYU Steinhardt spanning beyond Educational Theatre to include food studies; Media, Culture, and Communication; and more. Her symposium presentation focused on her potential dissertation project called The Women Who Feed Us, which involves interviewing women while cooking together and transforming those conversations into a devised theatre performance where food is prepared and shared with audiences during the show.

Like many students in the program, Mann sees theatre not simply as entertainment but as a vehicle for activism and collective care.

“I want to work in communities and with people who maybe haven’t had access to these kinds of experiences,” she says. “That’s what this work is really about.”

For students, the anniversary celebration was more than a retrospective. It was an affirmation that Educational Theatre continues to evolve alongside the communities it serves. In their own individual ways, Educational Theatre students at NYU Steinhardt are continuing a legacy rooted not only in performance, but in empathy, dialogue, and civic engagement.

To support this program, make an online contribution to Educational Theatre at NYU Steinhardt or contact Emily Mathis Corona, Senior Director of Development, for more information.