Angela M. Farr Schiller

Position
Associate Professor of Theater
Affiliated Departments

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My work is ultimately rooted in revealing the ways that performance can be utilized as a meaningful tool for critical thinking, social justice, and the development of empathy and compassion for the human experience.

Angela M. Farr Schiller, Ph.D., joined the Conservatory in 2022 and is an associate professor.

Dr. Schiller is an Emmy Award-winning director (2021), an award-winning dramaturg, educator, and scholar. As a dramaturg, she has worked on numerous productions including the West Coast premiere of Confederates by Dominique Morisseau under the direction of Nataki Garett at the Tony Award-winning Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Additionally, she works as a dramaturg-in-residence with the Atlanta-based Working Title Playwrights (WTP), the leading new play development organization in the Southeast. As a director, her production of Dreamgirls was nominated for six (San Francisco) Theatre Bay Area Awards including Outstanding Direction of a Musical and Outstanding Production of a Musical (2013), and her production of In the Red and Brown Water won an Outstanding Director Award (2016) from the Kennedy Center College Theatre Festival. Her televised production of The Georgia High School Musical Theatre Awards won a Southeast Emmy Award (2021). As a scholar, Dr. Schiller has presented her research on the intersections of race and performance at Performance Studies International (PSI), the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), Association of Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), and the International Society for the Oral Literatures of Africa (ISOLA). Her most recent published book projects are The Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays (Bloomsbury, 2021), nominated for a national Lambda Literary Award, and Troubling Traditions: Canonicity, Theatre, and Performance in the U.S. (Routledge, 2022) as well as a forthcoming article featured in the international journal Modern Drama entitled “Touching Back While Black: Self-Defense and the Politics of Black U.S. Citizenship in Paul Green’s In Abraham’s Bosom” (2023) and a chapter in the edited volume The Undivided Life: Faculty of Color Bringing Our Whole Selves to the Academy (2024). Most recently, Dr. Schiller was invited by the Boston Symphony Orchestra to hold a community conversation for the opening of their concert version of Ragtime at Tanglewood (2023). 

Dr. Schiller received her B.A. in theater from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she completed her final year of study at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. She also studied at the University of Ghana in Accra, Ghana, and the University degli Studi di Siena, Italy. She received her M.A. in Africana studies from the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and completed her Ph.D. in theater and performance studies at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

Professional Awards and Recognitions

  • National Lambda Literary Award Finalist (2022) for The Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays
  • Emmy Award Nomination (2022)—Director, televised production of the 2021 Georgia High School Musical Theater Awards
  • Emmy Award Recipient (2021)—Director, televised production of the 2020 Georgia High School Musical Theater Awards
  • Reiser Lab Award (2019)—Dramaturgy 
  • Reiser Lab Award (2017)—Dramaturgy
  • Kennedy Center Outstanding Director Award (2016)—Director, In the Red & Brown Water
  • Mellon Dissertation Prize for Outstanding Dissertation (2014)—The Choreography of Jim Crow: Race, Performance, and the Politics of Touch

Notable Recent Works

  • The Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays (Bloomsbury, 2021) 
  • Troubling Traditions: Canonicity, Theatre, and Performance in the U.S. (Routledge, 2022)
  • “Touching Back While Black: Self-Defense and the Politics of Black U.S. Citizenship in Paul Green’s In Abraham’s Bosom” in the international journal Modern Drama (2023)
  • Book chapter, “Finding Wholeness and Community in the Academy: Tales from a Sister Circle” in the edited volume The Undivided Life: Faculty of Color Bringing Our Whole Selves to the Academy (IAP, 2024)