University degrees: Postgraduate
Course length: 3 years
Course city: New York
If you are a young passionate hard-working actor, whatever your background and personal circumstances, who wants to have not just a career but a life as an artist—in the theater, in film, in TV, in emerging theatrical media, in fact wherever an embodiment of what it’s like to be human is needed—then we are looking for you.
We’re looking for people however whose artistic ambitions lie beyond themselves, who enjoy or imagine they’ll enjoy being part of a company. The training here is an exhilarating mix of the monastic and the outgoing. You engage with New York City in all its diversity, both passively and actively. You study minutely and are studied minutely in all those aspects that make up the total actor: sense of selfhood and sense of the other, technique and imagination, discipline and freedom.
Over fifty years, Grad Acting has consistently defined and refined a unique training program, one which the industry has recognized as being on the highest level. As you’ll discover as you explore further on this site, here at NYU, you will belong to a cohort of your peers—all MFA students—in classes and in numerous productions every year, chosen precisely to accommodate and feature the talents of each one of you, directed by respected professionals in the field. And we offer an exclusive hand’s-on collaboration with NYU’s world-class Graduate Film program film school. Your career begins here, in the heart of this vibrant city, and at the center of the respected Tisch School of the Arts, where the lifeblood of the theater, film, and television industries flows through on a daily basis; it’s our privilege—and our mission—to provide these opportunities for you.
We won’t teach you how to act. But we will help you to develop, to expand what you know you already have and, crucially, what you don’t know you already have.
The Grad Acting Program is a rich tapestry that weaves together many diverse strands of training, presentation, production, professionalism, and evaluation. It would be impossible to integrate so many different elements without a solid, yet ever-evolving, mission statement.
This section expands on that mission, explicating our philosophy in the arc of training, production, and life in New York City. It also contains the Ground Rules that every student agrees to uphold.
The arc of training at Grad Acting is a constantly evolving, but fully integrated, series of classes, based on the respective disciplines of Acting, Voice and Speech, and Movement. On any given day, students will experience all three disciplines and over the course of three years, students will have many of the same teachers, who are constantly ratcheting up the stakes and increasing the skill level demanded of their students. So, the arc of training provides an energetic balance between continuity and surprise, between assurance and obstacle, between confidence and challenge.
The training not only provides for the students to learn from the teachers, but for the teachers to learn from their students. Every year, feedback from our students is incorporated into the evolution of our training.
The specific classes for each year are described further by their individual instructors.
