Acting (MFA)
Program Description
Our mission is to send robust, curious, resourceful, engaged artisans out into the world. Actors who will combine their own identities and passions with their intense training to reveal the complexities of the 21st Century universe to a vast audience.
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. 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 & 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.
Our faculty members and directors are teaching artists active in New York City’s theatre, film, and television industry. Studying with them as well as developing mentoring contacts with our alumni in New York and Los Angeles helps our students to establish themselves in their professional life.
In addition, our students develop working relationships with their Tisch School of the Arts peers through collaboration classes with students from Grad Film & Television, Dramatic Writing, Graduate Design, and the Martin Scorsese Virtual Production Center.
At the end of three years, our students are settled in New York City and one step ahead in their professional life. 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.
Admissions
All graduate applicants to the Tisch School of the Arts are required to submit the General Graduate Application, as well as a department-specific portfolio or creative supplement. Each of these can be submitted online.
See Graduate Admissions for admission requirements and instructions specific to this program.
For international applicants, see International Applicant Requirements. Applicants with international credentials should be sure to check to see if their credentials are equivalent to an American Bachelor’s degree before applying.