Express your artistic vision
and prepare for a career in directing
Boston University’s directing program provides early-career professionals with the opportunity to cultivate their artistic identities and professional objectives while refining and enhancing their technical skills and range. Students are prepared for directing careers, with special emphasis on understanding the American theatre and its’ contemporary applications to narrative performance.
Ranked nationally as a top directing program:
listed in Backstage’s 19 MFA Programs you should know about in 2021
The Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in directing at BU is individually designed with each student’s artistic strengths, challenges, and personal ambitions in mind. Each School of Theatre (SOT) MFA directing student receives extensive experience in the rehearsal hall in a sequence of projects chosen to stretch and showcase their strengths. Directing students get to direct several of SOT’s productions per season in a variety of venues with ever-growing access to designers.
The program centers around identifying and growing students’ artistic voices, honing their craft and techniques, and connecting to the profession in a meaningful way. What makes BU’s directing program stand out? The quality. Quality of productions. Quality of peers. Quality of actors. BU MFA directing graduates become freelance directors or artistic directors, running their own companies or teaching.
What I really like about our program is that there’s a lot of production opportunities, coupled with intense classwork. There is a good balance here between being in rehearsal and being back in the lab (classroom) working on aspects of the rehearsal process.
Degrees Offered
CREATIVES IN PRACTICE: JIM FAGAN
For some, summer season means slowing down and taking a break. For Jim Fagan, it’s been nonstop, in the best way. Between serving as resident director on the new musical The Real Kyle McCarren at Joe’s Pub in New York City, working with seasoned Broadway directors and Emmy-winning writers, and performing late-night comedy shows at festivals, Fagan, assistant professor of directing at Boston University, is committed to expanding these opportunities to his students.
Fagan recently shared with CFA what he’s been up to this summer and how being an educator has helped him become a better artist and professional. Fagan, whose career highlights include writing for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and directing and producing for Comedy Central, also reflects on his first anniversary teaching at BU School of Theatre.
“Being an educator is making me a better artist and professional… having just finished my first year at the School of Theatre, this setup I have now is the dream. It absolutely makes me a better artist to sharpen my skills by working with our incredible students, learn from my colleagues, and check in with my core artistic principles and philosophies as I teach them. Do they still hold up? How can I deepen them? What are the roots of the work I do? Then I take all that good exercise and bring it back out into the field where I can rely on it and draw on it without overthinking as I move at the pace of professional work.”
Featured Faculty
-
Jim Fagan
Assistant Professor of Directing
-
Wendy Goldberg
Professor, Directing
-
Clay Hopper
Senior Lecturer, Directing
-
Tasia Jones
Assistant Professor of Acting and Directing
Meet BU’s Directing Program Head
Wendy Goldberg, program head and professor of directing at BU, has spent more than 20 years leading the foremost programs in the development, direction, and production of new works for the American Theatre. As Artistic Director of the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center for 16 seasons, under Goldberg’s tenure, 100 plays were developed and the O’Neill was awarded the 2010 Regional Tony Award. Goldberg has also been ranked by Variety as one of the top 50 film instructors from around the world.
In CFA’s Faculty Feature series, Goldberg explains the role and importance of the director in a theatrical production and shares her thoughts on why a director should choose BU’s directing program.
“The director is the primary collaborator on a production. The director is the person who needs to bring all the other collaborators together to tell the story. This requires a lot of conversations and time spent listening to writers, designers, and actors – all of the people we put in a room to make the play. The director is the captain of the ship moving a group of collaborators into a production. The director and the writer are the primary storytellers.”
Related Work
Explore More
Degrees & Programs
News & Events
Related News
Directing Outside the Box
Faculty Feature: Wendy Goldberg
