Chair’s Message
Whether you are joining FIU Theatre for the first time or returning for another year, I am excited to welcome you back to our classrooms, studios, shops, rehearsal halls, and stages. A new academic year gives us the opportunity not only to begin again, but to build on what we have learned and challenge ourselves to imagine what comes next.
Don’t forget our Majors Meeting, required attendance for all majors, will be held in the Blackbox on Friday, Aug 28th at 3:30 p.m. We look forward to seeing you all there!
Pardon Our Dust—It’s time for a facelift.
As you return, you may notice some changes underway. Please pardon our dust as we continue making improvements to our educational and theatrical spaces. These updates are part of our ongoing commitment to creating stronger environments for learning, making, rehearsing, designing, and performing.
And there could not be a more fitting year to invest in these spaces: the Wertheim Performing Arts Center celebrates its 30th anniversary this year!
For three decades, the Wertheim has been a home for artists, students, educators, and audiences—a place where thousands of students have taken creative risks, developed their craft, built lifelong collaborations, and discovered the kind of artists they want to become. We are proud of that history, and we are equally excited about what comes next.
So, as we celebrate 30 years of the Wertheim Performing Arts Center, we are also looking forward to its future. Improvements sometimes come with a little disruption, and we appreciate your patience and flexibility as the work continues. Please keep an eye out, as some of the classes from the Design Studio needed to shift to another location for the time being. Consider the dust evidence that we are still growing—honoring the past while building the spaces in which the next generation of FIU artists will create.
Welcome Back to Our Students
You are at the center of everything we do. Your curiosity, passion, ingenuity, and hard work bring our department to life. Theatre is built through collaboration, and some of your greatest teachers will be the people working beside you. Support one another. Learn from one another. Ask questions, take risks, and be willing to try something you do not yet know how to do.
Remember, too, that your education extends far beyond the classroom. Get involved in our 2026–27 season. Audition. Volunteer in the shops. Observe a rehearsal. Work backstage. Attend performances. Or bring your own ideas to CARPE DM, our student-led second-stage series. Every experience is an opportunity to discover something new about your craft and yourself.
Need calendar information or production handbooks? Look at the Design Technology and Management Headquarters page at go.fiu.edu/DTMHQ
Want to submit a suggestion for the next FIU Mainstage Season? Fill out a form at go.fiu.edu/Season
Want to submit a proposal for Carpe DM in FM 150? Fill out a form at go.fiu.edu/carpeDM
Welcome Back to Our Faculty and Staff
Thank you for the extraordinary expertise, creativity, mentorship, and care you bring to our students and our department. The strength of FIU Theatre comes from artists and educators who are committed not simply to teaching what we already know, but to continually questioning, exploring, and evolving our practice.
Theatre is an unusual and remarkable art form. We create something together knowing that it will never exist in exactly the same way again. Every production is a prototype. Every rehearsal is an experiment. Every performance depends upon artists with different skills, perspectives, and ideas trusting one another enough to build something none of them could create alone.
That makes our spaces more than classrooms and stages. They are laboratories for exploration, storytelling, collaboration, and discovery. I hope this year you give yourself permission to play, question, reach, fail, reconsider, and try again.
Our 2026–27 Season: What Lies Beneath
That spirit of discovery is also at the heart of our new season. This year, Elektra, Company, Holiday, and Overtones & Trifles invite us to look beyond appearances and explore the complicated inner lives we carry beneath the versions of ourselves we present to the world.
Who are we when the exterior falls away? What do we reveal, what do we conceal, and what happens when our inner selves can no longer remain hidden?
Across tragedy, musical theatre, comedy, and groundbreaking works by women playwrights, our season explores the tension between the self we show and the self within—between expectation and desire, appearance and truth, the roles we perform for others and the people we are still becoming. Our work is not simply about arriving at a finished performance. It is about discovery—of a character, an idea, a craft, one another, and sometimes ourselves.
As we begin this new year—and celebrate 30 years of creativity, collaboration, and performance at the Wertheim—I encourage each of you to show up fully: for your classes, for your productions, for your collaborators, and for one another.
Be curious. Be generous. Be ambitious. And never be afraid to say, “Yes, and…”
Welcome back to FIU Theatre. Thank you for growing, creating, questioning, and building with us. I cannot wait to see the stories we will tell, the discoveries we will make, and what we will build and reveal together this year.