Next month, the final cohort of the Brown/Trinity Rep Master of Fine Arts Programs in Acting and Directing will graduate following an indefinite admissions pause set in January 2025. The program will shut down while administrators “identify ways to make improvements and move forward with the strongest possible programs,” according to the program’s website.
The program, which was launched in 2002, is run in partnership with Trinity Repertory Company — a Providence-based regional theater — to provide students with the opportunity to learn from professional guest artists and gain performing experience.
“As we made clear upon conveying this news in 2025, leaders at Brown and Trinity Rep determined that the joint training model that had been in place needed to be re-examined to adapt to changing conditions, as the field of acting and directing evolved over recent years,” University spokesperson Brian Clark wrote in an email to The Herald.
“It’s important to make clear that the decision made jointly by leaders at both Brown and Trinity was not driven by financial considerations,” he added.
According to last year’s announcement, Brown was convening a “working group” led by Sydney Skybetter, director of the Brown Arts Institute, to “envision the future of professional performing arts training in the context of a research university.”
Skybetter wrote in an email to The Herald that “Brown is not pursuing a relaunch of the program within BAI,” and clarified that “there is no single group” charged with determining the future of the program. Instead, “a range of conversations have taken place, internal and external to Brown, with colleagues whose expertise is in practice-oriented pedagogy and curricular policy” to determine the program’s future.
“What BAI has learned from those conversations is shaping the courses we’re launching this fall, and we expect the classes themselves to teach us something in return,” he added.
The Herald spoke with four students in the program’s graduating cohort, who all lamented the decision to indefinitely pause admissions and reflected positively on their time at Brown.
Getting rid of the program “is the worst mistake Brown could ever make,” said Lucia Aremu GS, a current MFA student. For Aremu, the program “felt like an anchor” for the undergraduate theater arts program at Brown because master’s students often work with undergraduate playwrights.
Abram Blau GS said Brown’s program is “really special among MFA programs. We’re the only MFA Acting Program I know of that has its students take four semesters of directing and three of playwriting.”
Henry Nwaru GS said he appreciated the program’s unique emphasis on repetition. “It will seem tedious at times, but now in this third year of mine, I'm seeing that, that constant repetition, that constant work that you are forced to do … it creates resilience,” he added.
The opportunity to perform at Trinity Rep alongside his professors and professional actors has “been really, really wonderful,” Blau said. They were people “I was looking up to at the beginning of my time here, and now we’re looking at each other face to face,” he said.
“It’s a positive feedback loop in the best way,” Nwaru said. “Working alongside them, especially when you get on stage, you see them doing these amazing things, and it lights a fire in you where it’s just like, okay, all right, I’ve got to step my game up.”
Nwaru says he plans to use the relationships he’s developed through the program as he enters the art world post-graduation. “I'm going to make a concerted effort to reach out to the people who I've had the chance to work with, and just start creating for art's sake,” he said.
“I'm just going to focus on just doing work that propels me,” Aremu said. “I’m really, really, really interested in just really pouring into my community, my Brown community, my Brown/Trinity community.”
The collaboration between professionals and students facilitated by the Brown/Trinity program is typical for “top-tier” training programs, Columbus wrote. “It was one of the main reasons that the Brown/Trinity program was ranked third among MFA programs nationally in its last year.”
Brown is not the only university to pause its MFA program in recent years. In 2017, Harvard shut down its American Repertory Theater Institute program and the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco shuttered their MFA program in 2022.
“There’s been a big change in theater and the theater industry,” Evelyn Dumont GS explained.
Instead of MFA training, “people feel like they can just workshop their way through,” Aremu said.
Even as the MFA program comes to an end, the partnership between Brown and Trinity Rep continues to evolve. “We have been working with leaders from Trinity Rep to redefine our partnership in new ways in support of the performing arts at Brown and at Trinity,” Clark wrote.
Noa Saviano is a senior staff writer covering Graduate Schools and Students. She is a freshman from New York City and plans on concentrating in Comparative Literature and Cognitive Science.
