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The College of Arts & Sciences
The Department of Performing and Media Arts leads students from all disciplines through artistic and scholarly explorations of live performance forms, such as theatre and dance, and mediated forms, such as cinema and television. Students are challenged to think creatively, critically and historically about the world around them as they identify and interpret the power of image, sound, gesture and movement and cultivate their own artistic and academic voices.
Through their involvements in PMA, students will develop the following:
Building on the legacy of Cornell faculty who pioneered the field of theatre studies, PMA faculty and students are taking the next steps in this evolution. Signaled in part by our change from Theatre, Film and Dance to Performing and Media Arts in 2012, our research and creative work has forged new modes as we find fresh ways to produce work across disciplines and at the sites of contact among cinema, media, dance, theatre, performance art, installation and more.
We are proud to offer popular courses like “American Cinema,” “Television,” and “The American Musical,” and also more intimate instruction in filmmaking, acting, dance technique and design. Students from across campus come to PMA to combine critical and creative inquiry with gesture, movement, vocal expressivity and material application, directly informing their career successes, no matter their chosen path. Those who chose to major or minor in PMA achieve the highest honors. Our alumni include
Our faculty’s strengths span the spectrum of expertise in the performing and media arts, with accomplished researchers and industry professionals building a robust curriculum. Actively creating important artistic and scholarly works in theatre, dance, film, television and new media, PMA’s faculty have been nominated for and won top honors from the Pulitzer Prize in Drama to the leading book prizes conferred by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.
Our vision is vitally transnational, reflected for instance by coursework in “Global Cinema,” “Global Dance” and “Global Stages.” It is also work focused on issues of ethics, law and social justice, demonstrated by efforts like those of our many faculty and students who are leaders in prison studies or in prison theatre at Cornell and beyond. We engage the world around us through our work and fully believe in the arts’ social, political and cultural impact on local and global problems.
Location: Schwartz Center for Performing Arts, October 22: Room 220, Schwartz Center; November 11: Zoom
Watch online: Cornell in Los Angeles Information Sessions - Fall 2026
Location: Schwartz Center for Performing Arts, 220
Location: Schwartz Center for Performing Arts, Kiplinger Theatre
Location: Schwartz Center for Performing Arts, Kiplinger Theatre
Location: Schwartz Center for Performing Arts, Film Forum
Location: Schwartz Center for Performing Arts, Kiplinger Theatre
Join us for a conversation with John Sloss, the founder and CEO of Cinetic as he tells us how he got his start and offers advice and stories for those interested in the world of Hollywood film and television production and distribution. Join us for a conversation with Emmy winning music editor Craig Pettigrew as…
PMA Professor David Feldshuh visited and spoke with the students in Ph.D. student Isaiah Washington’s First-Year Writing Seminar titled, "Writing Medicine: Stories of Illness and Healing.”
PMA Associate Professor Karen Jaime will discuss her role as co-curator of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Founders Archive Project Collection at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at NYU, on Tuesday, October 13, at 6:00 PM. This event, "In the Gallery with Dr. Karen Jaime" is part of a month-long series of events entitled…
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night meets the intoxicating madness of music from the Roaring 1920s Jazz Age in a production adapted and directed by David Feldshuh for Cornell’s Department of Performing and Media Arts. Twelfth Night features a cast of twenty-two including fourteen actors, a singing chorus, dancers, and the onstage presence of professional jazz musician, Mike…