Note about overlapping courses
While some PMA instructors will allow students to enroll in classes that overlap, not all do. If your proposed Fall 2025 schedule includes overlaps, please consult with the faculty in question before enrolling so that you can adjust your enrollment plans if necessary.
PMA 1611 Rehearsal and Performance
Instructor: Danielle Russo
Class Schedule: TBA (1-4 credits)
Students participating in a PMA creative project led by Assistant Professor of the Practice Danielle Russo can earn PMA 1611 credit.
PMA 3508 Material Filmmaking
Instructor: Doorim Kim
Class schedule: TR 1:25 p.m. - 4:25 p.m. (3 credits)
A course that creates films through various cameras and tools. Using everything from film still photography to 16mm film and digital cameras, students will make diverse and experimental films. This class encourages students to step outside the traditional boundaries of cinema and create new and experimental projects.
PMA 3243 Making Dance on Camera
Instructor: Danielle Russo
Class Schedule: MW 2:30 p.m. - 4:25 p.m. (4 credits)
Making Dance on Camera is an interdisciplinary laboratory course where students acquire and apply fundamental camera, direction, editing, and production skills through the context and collaboration of dance/movement choreography. With studies and exercises ranging from dance film and cinema to music videos, screendance, and new media and digital platforms, students will develop both hands-on and conceptual skills to produce original projects in gaining a deeper, personal understanding of the practice, power, history, theory, and potential for the dancing/moving body and its story on screen.
PMA 3686 Collaborative Art Practices
Instructor: Mendi Obadike and Keith Obadike
Class Schedule: TR 1:25 p.m. - 4:45 p.m. (4 credits)
This course explores creative collaboration, examining effective methods for leading and participating in artist-teams across various disciplines. Students will study successful models of collective art-making, drawing insights from visual arts collectives, film crews, theatre ensembles, art studios, bands, and community art projects. The course covers historical approaches, contemporary best practices, and emerging collaborative techniques, offering a cross-disciplinary view of teamwork in the arts. Through analysis of case studies and class projects, students will develop skills for fostering productive creative partnerships, managing group dynamics, and navigating the challenges of collective authorship.
PMA/VSST 4660: Adaptation: Visceral Text and Performance
Instructor: Beth F. Milles
Class Schedule: TR 2:30 p.m. - 4:25 p.m. (4 credits)
How do we tell and do justice to our most complex, fantastical (or intangible) stories?
The act of adaptation invokes a response to source material from a variety of inspiration(s) -- images, poems, stories, iconic moments, people, legends, events, histories.
Artist/creators work to transcend and translate resonant and remnant questions, curiosities, and provocations in their work—the act and very action of making and crafting this work evokes a reconciling or a recontextualizing of event and revelation. Writer/creators are visual and physical explorers, choreographers of language text and imagery, filmmakers and installation artists, playwrights and producers. Some of the work we will explore this year includes the inspiration of Tectonic Theatre Project, Anne Bogart (SITI Company) Carrie Mae Weems, Complicite, Toni Morrison, Bill Rauch, Laurence O Keefe, Suzan Lori Parks, Elevator Repair Service, Kate Hamill and Bill T Jones.
This wholly interactive course challenges the boundaries of text/image to uncover the possibilities of performance. How do we translate inspiration (and fascination) into tangible visual/interactive imagery? Working collaboratively—in workshop format—as actors and writers, students explore the process of developing performance pieces based on a variety of sources. Examining the work of artists whose work translates from one medium to another (television/film/live and mediated performance), we investigate take and exploration.
Special focus will be given in to works staging unrest/interrogating social change and works of art/film/performance adaptation which develop in response to current events.
Please reach out for permission code or for additional information: bfm6@cornell.edu
PMA 4701/6701 Nightlife
Instructor: Karen Jaime
Class Schedule: TR 12:20 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. (4 credits)
This course explores nightlife as a temporality that fosters countercultural performances of the self and that serves as a site for the emergence of alternative kinship networks. Focusing on queer communities of color, course participants will be asked to interrogate the ways in which nightlife demonstrates the queer world-making potential that exists beyond the normative 9-5 capitalist model of production. Performances of the everyday, alongside films, texts, and performance art, will be analyzed through a performance studies methodological lens. Through close readings and sustained cultural analysis, students will acquire a critical understanding of the potentiality of spaces, places, and geographies codified as "after hours" in the development of subcultures, alternative sexualities, and emerging performance practices.
PMA 4712 Queer TV
Instructor: Nick Salvato
Class Schedule: MW 2:55 p.m. - 4:10 p.m. (3 credits)
This upper-level seminar considers the long evolution of queer and trans TV from its role in the origins of television as a medium through its contemporary manifestations. The premises of the course—subject to complication and contestation—include the notions that we stall as thinkers and viewers when we dwell both in the illogic of progress narratives and in the tepid debate about “good” versus “bad” televised representations of LGBTQ+ lives and experiences; that close audiovisual analysis lies at the heart of a generative study of television that must also attend closely to economic, industrial, and sociocultural schemes; and that any discourse about queerness that does not move intersectionally, with attention to race, class, ability, gender, and more, is an imprecise and inadequate one.
PMA 4866/6866 Practicum in Performance Criticism and Dramaturgy
Instructor: J. Ellen Gainor
Class Schedule: MW 10:10 a.m. - 11:25 p.m. (4 credits)
The function of the theatre critic is well understood, but the role of the dramaturg remains mysterious in the American theatre. Yet theatre critics and dramaturgs use many of the same research, analytic, and writing skills, and need the same knowledge of history, literature, and culture, to perform their duties effectively. This practicum, designed for advanced undergraduates and graduate students, will allow participants to develop the skills central to these complementary professions. The course will include units on writing effective performance reviews, working with student playwrights on new script development, preparing informational materials for directors, designers and actors, writing program essays and other informational materials for audiences, script preparation for production, and selecting/preparing translations for production. While our focus will be on the theatre, students with interest in applying these skills to film/television/media or dance contexts are welcome.
PMA Fall 2025 Courses
Check out the full list of PMA courses on the Spring 2026 Courses page.