Yale Summer Session Acting Program Curriculum

The Yale Summer Session Acting Program is structured as a series of interconnected sections, each focused on a fundamental element of acting. Designed as an experimental lab, the curriculum prioritizes process, exploration, and individual growth over public performance.

More than just acting or scene study, the Yale Summer Session Acting Program offers students an entire program comprised of a series of sections, each focused on a fundamental element of acting. Sections concentrate on the following:

• Acting: Exercise and Scene work
• Text Analysis: to comprehend the material being acted
• On-Camera Acting: Taught by acclaimed actors Welker White and Damian Young from The Moving Frame
• Voice: training to help the actor find a released, responsive voice
• Clowning: to encourage risk-taking and a sense of play
• Masterclasses: focusing on rehearsal and technique with Evan Yionoulis, Dean and Director of the Richard Rogers Drama Division at Juilliard

Students are placed in small sections to allow for significant individual focus and personalized feedback. With no leading roles or public production, faculty attention is distributed equally across all students.

This is an intensive program. Students should expect approximately 30 hours per week in class, plus an additional 10 hours of rehearsal or preparation. Most coursework is project-based and collaborative, making rehearsal time outside of class an essential part of the learning process.

[note] This is an intense program with a very full schedule designed to maximize the time. Students should expect to spend 30 hours a week in class and an additional 10 hours each week of rehearsal/homework time. The 2025 daily schedule and syllabus are indicative of what students can expect in 2026.

Outside of the classroom, students work, study, and play. Because the majority of class work is project-based and dependent on collaboration with other students, rehearsal time outside of class is valuable. Weekends are spent rehearsing and enjoying personal time.

About Our Faculty

The faculty consists of seasoned theater professionals actively working in regional and New York theaters, as well as in film and television. Many are alumni or current educators at the Yale School of Drama. These industry experts lead students through the Yale Summer Session's Acting Program rigorous and dynamic curriculum, offering intensive, personalized, hands-on training in the fundamentals of the craft.

Read about the Summer Drama Faculty.

Please take a look at a video introduction to the program featuring our former Director.

Course Descriptions

Each course in the Yale Summer Session Acting Program is designed to build essential skills, combining hands-on practice, analysis, and guidance from expert faculty.

Text Analysis

Instructor: John Evans Reese

This course introduces the basic tools of breaking down a script into its necessary components that are most useful to ignite the actor’s imagination in order to prepare them to work in rehearsal and in performance. Focusing on Henrik Ibsen’s A DOLL'S HOUSE, we will cultivate how to excavate a script for the necessary given circumstances: map the events, relationships, historical and societal context, as well as sensorial and tactile facts present in the play that will allow the actor to be most alive on the floor. We will explore various adaptations of the play in order to see how a playwright’s personal lens alters the play. We will watch various performances to see how a director can influence a play. Simultaneously, one day a week, we will have a HUMANITIES course wherein we will work on the holistic artist. We will examine arts from all points of view: documentaries, letters, poetry, painting, music, film, architecture, and dance. An actor must first be a human with a bold point of view.

Voice & Speech

Instructor: Stephanie Machado

This course introduces the tools necessary to improve vocal production, resonance, articulation, and interpretive skills. The course will focus on heightening the student’s proprioception in order to break down habitual tendencies and free their natural voice. There will be an overview of anatomy and alignment in relation to voice production. The course work will culminate in its application to text and performance, while also implementing the tools provided to better embody and personalize text.

Acting

Intructor: Will Cobbs

This course focuses on action-based analysis, helping students identify beat structure, actions, obstacles, stakes, objectives, and super-objectives in a scene. Students cultivate the ability to work and respond in the moment, while practicing strategies to avoid common pitfalls such as simply playing the idea, the mood, or the end of the scene.

Scene Study

Instructor: Annelise Lawson

 The collaborative work of the actor begins with an ability to map dramatic action and truthfully live in imagined circumstances in ways that enhance the quality and power of their performances. This course investigates Stanislavski-based acting techniques, including given circumstance, objective, action, and the dynamics embedded in scene structure. By the course's end, students will have: a practical understanding of dramaturgical and acting terminology; and ability to identify shifting relationships and events over the course of a scene; and how to play physical and verbal actions in the service of a need or objective.

Clown | Physical Acting

Instructor: Gabriel Levey

Through games, original song writing, improvisation, and a series of fundamental Clown exercises, students will strengthen their ability to listen; to play without shame; to be generous with themselves and others; and to be courageous and vulnerable enough to fail, fail again and then fail better. It’s going to be fun, like a lot of fun, maybe too much and then a little more. And laughter, lots and lots of laughter. Get ready to play!

Scene Study

Instructor: Eli Pauley

 Ultimately the art of acting is simple. It can be reduced to sending and receiving; breath, energy, impulse. We will imprint this muscle memory into our bodies; throwing a ball, catching it, and throwing it back with intention. With wonder. With discovery. With history, curiosity, and a sense of play. With appetite. In an effort to make someone else feel something. I’m interested in and excited by theater where something is happening in the room, energetically, not just inside of the actor. In a world of zoom boxes, this is what the communal arena of the theater has to offer us if we dare to step outside of our own bubbles. We must risk--and welcome!--abject failure if we are to reach for soaring triumph.