News by Topic: Performing Arts

As 2025 comes to a close, we’re reflecting on a year filled with milestones, innovation, and inspiring stories from across the RIT community. 

Two civil engineering technology graduates from 2008 have returned to the RIT campus, this time, to use their knowledge to help build the Music Performance Theater set to open next spring.

After arriving on campus for the first time just a few weeks before their audition, Angel Ash landed a major role in Macbeth, showing in the SHED’s Sklarsky Glass Box Theater.

Five months before the first audience is expected in RIT’s new Music Performance Theater, a string quartet from the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra and students from the RIT Philharmonic Orchestra were the first to take the stage to help conduct acoustic testing.

Thousands of students, alumni, their families, and others have already registered to attend at least one of dozens of events Oct. 17-19 during Brick City Homecoming and Family Weekend.

Food, music, trivia contests, and plenty of selfies were featured at a free student picnic Thursday outside the Gene Polisseni Center to kick off two days of events for the inauguration of Bill Sanders, RIT’s 11th president.

Animation is most often viewed on a screen. But when animators break traditional rules and abandon the “almighty rectangle,” Christine Banna says artistic magic can happen.

With more than 3,000 students participating in the performing arts at RIT, including a record 601 new Performing Arts Scholars and more than 50 performing arts-focused student clubs, it’s not hard to find instrumental, vocal, theatrical, and dance performances on and around campus throughout the year.

RIT’s newest Tigers were formally welcomed Thursday with cheers, advice, and challenges to dream big.

Emery Rios, a combined accelerated cybersecurity BS/MS student, was selected for the Norman A. Miles Award for Academic Excellence in Study for the 2025-2026 academic year. The award is given to a student who began their studies as a first-year student at RIT and is entering their final year of undergraduate study with the highest grade point average across the university.

The naming of the Dave and Nancy Munson Amphitheater, part of the new Music Performance Theater, was revealed at a celebration on June 12 in the SHED, surprising the couple before a crowd of students, alumni, dignitaries, board members, and family members.

The campus may seem quiet, but RIT Facilities Management Services is in high gear, racing to complete over 100 construction projects before students return in late August.