Joe Salvatore
Clinical Professor and Director, Educational Theatre; Vice Chair for Academic Affairs
Music and Performing Arts Professions
212-998-5266
Joe Salvatore founded and directs NYU Steinhardt's Verbatim Performance Lab (VPL) and teaches courses in verbatim performance, ethnodrama, community-engaged theatre, and new play development. He is also the author of Creating Ethnodrama: A Theatrical Approach to Research (Guilford Press).
Current projects include an international research collaboration examining how interview-based verbatim performance interventions can disrupt discrimination in healthcare delivery; an ethnodrama exploring the impact of clergy sexual abuse on survivors' spirituality and health; an interview project examining freedom of expression and academic freedom at NYU; and a verbatim performance project investigating US presidential inaugural addresses from the past 100 years.
Joe's work using theatre to explore political events began with Her Opponent, a verbatim re-staging of excerpts of the 2016 presidential debates with gender-reversed casting, created in collaboration with Maria Guadalupe (2017 nominee, Off Broadway Alliance Award for Best Unique Theatrical Experience). Subsequent projects focused on politics and current events include The Lauer/Conway Flip (2017), The Moore/Jones Challenge (2017), The Kavanaugh Files (2018), The Serena Williams Project (2019 w/Tammie L. Swopes), The Democratic Field (2019-2020), Guess the Candidate (2020), If You Wanna Switch Seats, We Could (2021), The Harris/Pence Flip (2021), and Whatever You Are, Be a Good One (2022), That's Not Supposed to Be Happening (2023), and That's Not a Partisan Feeling, That's Patriotic (2024), all through the Verbatim Performance Lab and with his primary collaborator, Keith R. Huff.
Awards include the American Alliance for Theatre and Education’s Johnny Saldaña Outstanding Professor of Theatre Education Award for demonstrated excellence in teaching, research, creative activity, and service; NYU's Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Faculty Award; NYU Steinhardt's Teaching Excellence Award; NYU Steinhardt's Champions of Equity: Gender and Trans Justice Award; and the NYU LGBTQ Student Center's Dedication to Education Award.
Joe is a cluster member of the University of British Columbia's Research-based Theatre Collaborative, a collaborating faculty member with Arts & Health @ NYU, an advisory board member for Artists' Literacies Institute, and an alumnus of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab. Member: Dramatists Guild of America, Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and American Alliance for Theatre and Education.
Selected Publications
- Salvatore, J. (2025). Creating ethnodrama: A theatrical approach to research. Guilford Press.
- Salvatore, J. (2025). Ethnodrama / ethnotheatre. In P. Leavy (Ed.), The handbook of arts-based research (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
- Medeiros, L., Stannard, L., Salvatore, J. (2025). Contextualizing If You Wanna Switch Seats, We Could. McGill Journal of Education / Revue Des Sciences De l’éducation De McGill, 59(1), 225–233. Retrieved from https://mje.mcgill.ca/article/view/10266
- Salvatore, J. (2023). Verbatim performance and its possibilities. ArtsPraxis, 10 (1), pp. 1-20.
- Vachon, W., & Salvatore, J. (2022). Wading the quagmire: Aesthetics and ethics in verbatim theatre: Act 1. Qualitative Inquiry (published online, p. 1-10).
- Salvatore, J. (2020). Scripting the ethnodrama. In P. Leavy (Ed.), Oxford handbook of qualitative research. Oxford University Press.
- Sajnani, N., Sallis, R., & Salvatore, J. (2018). Three arts based researchers walk into a forum: A conversation on the opportunities and challenges in embodied and performed research. In P. Duffy, C. Hatton, and R. Sallis (Eds.), Drama research methods: Provocations of practice. Sense Publishers.
- Salvatore, J. (2014). Articulate and activate: An approach to self-assessment in theatre training. In J. McVarish & C. Milne (Eds.), Teacher educators rethink self-assessment in higher education: A guide for the perplexed (pp. 115-132). Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.
- McVarish, J. , & Salvatore, J. (2014). Vulnerability: A metalogue. In J. McVarish & C. Milne (Eds.), Teacher educators rethink self-assessment in higher education: A guide for the perplexed (pp. 47-60). Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.
- Salvatore, J. (2011). Scenes from open heart by Joe Salvatore. In J. Saldaña (Ed.), Ethnotheatre: Research from page to stage (pp. 87-98). Left Coast Press, Inc.
- Salvatore, J. (2010). Overcoming fear and resistance when teaching Shakespeare. In D. Wyse, R. Andrews, & J. Hoffman (Eds.), The Routledge international handbook of English, language and literacy teaching (pp. 379-388). Routledge.