WHY PS @ NYU
From the minute I was cast as Fairy #4 in A Midsummer Night's Dream my freshman year at Lehigh University, I knew that I would always be a performer. i believed my place was on stage, and I thought of myself as an actor, yet I never really enjoyed the performances as much as the rehearsals. I knew I didn't want the life of an actor, but the theatre was what I knew and loved. An older professor saw me struggling with figuring out my next step as I entered my senior year, and he mentioned that there was a program where I could study all kinds of performance, and where my knowledge base could be useful for something other than acting. I was intrigued, and looked up this "performance studies."
From the minute I saw the website, I knew that I wanted to be there. I wanted to get out of rural Pennsylvania into New York City, to be surrounded by art forms I had never encountered before, and to meet people from all types of intellectual backgrounds. I already knew I loved literary theory, and the opportunity to use those techniques on objects other than just published texts was incredibly exciting. When I went to the open house, I heard people like Richard Schechner, Ann Pellegrini, and Barbara Browning speak, and I made appointments to meet with them one-on-one and talk more about what I was interested in learning. In a few short minutes, these people managed to show me new ways of using my brain and inspired me to expand what I quickly realized had been a limited frame of reference in terms of performance.