News
School of Performing Arts

A 750-seat music performance theater will be constructed on the RIT campus to offer a venue for musical theater productions. The new building will be the first of two theaters in a performing arts center. The first phase will be an iconic building with more than 40,000 square feet of space, with anticipated completion in 2025.

Three RIT students involved in last semester’s production of Everybody brought home awards from the Region II Kennedy Center College Theatre Fest, held Jan. 17-22.

Joe Beard, a legendary blues guitarist and vocalist from Rochester, is scheduled to perform with students from RIT’s “Harmonica and the Blues” class from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Nov. 17 at University Gallery in Booth Hall.

On Thursday, Nov. 3, RIT’s College of Art and Design, College of Liberal Arts, and School of Individualized Study invites the community to a performance by Radical Reversal, a five-piece experimental poetry band.

The Liberal Arts Multidisciplinary Scholars program, which is being introduced this fall, gives financial support to students in STEM majors who are interested in adding a second major from RIT's College of Liberal Arts.

RIT students, faculty, and staff will contribute music, dance, comedy, poetry, photojournalism, and more during the 11th annual Rochester Fringe Festival, which begins Sept. 13 and continues through Sept. 24 in downtown Rochester.

RIT's Performing Arts Scholars are smart and academic achievers, inquisitive and curious, creative and imaginative, driven to succeed, do not accept failure, and are goal oriented.

WXXI’s “Connections” program features Thomas Warfield, senior lecturer and director of dance.

RIT President David Munson welcomed the community for the start of a new academic year with a call to re-energize the campus’s atmosphere to its pre-pandemic level. During his annual President’s Address in Ingle Auditorium this morning, Munson encouraged all RIT faculty, staff, and students to make a new academic year resolution to spend more time face-to-face with one another.

RIT's 2022-2023 theater season will include Everybody, a morality play on death; a production celebrating Thomas Warfield’s 25th anniversary of dance at NTID; a musical on unexpected connections; a play of episodic poems on deafness, violence, and resistance; and a dance production of an extended 1970s progressive rock song.

Intersections: The RIT Podcast, Ep. 59: In July 2022, RIT opens a new School of Performing Arts to offer additional creative opportunities for thousands of students who wish to pursue their passions in performance while majoring in a range of other fields. College of Liberal Arts Dean Anna Stenport talks with Thomas Warfield, director of dance at NTID, and Assistant Professor Yunn-Shan Ma, director of the RIT Philharmonic Orchestra, on ways RIT is making dreams come true for students interested in performing arts.

RIT has named Erica Haskell professor and inaugural director of the university’s new School of Performing Arts. Haskell comes to RIT from the University of New Haven. She was selected as school director following a nationwide search and will begin her new role on July 1.