FSEM 166   Theater, Play, and Imagination

Faculty Profile for Professor Sweeney

Introduces students to the creative and artistic process. Through the unique lens of theater students explore connections between somatic, improvisational, and imaginative practices crucial to performance making and spectatorship. Comprising a series of studio exercises, emphasis is placed on developing skills for imaginative reading and text analysis alongside explorations in dramaturgy, directing, and performance. Students who successfully complete this course receive credit for a 100-level THEA course and can satisfy the human thought and expression areas of inquiry requirement or the artistic practice and interpretation liberal arts practice.

April Sweeney is an actor, director of theater and film, and Professor of Theater at Colgate University. She has performed in theaters and festivals in Argentina, Bolivia, Belgium, Colombia, Costa Rica, France, Hungary and in theaters across the United States. Her most recent directing projects include Romina Paula's FAUNA (Torn Page, NYC Fall 2022, 2023) and Sauda Jackson's 4 episode transmedia performance memoir, I DIGRESS: The Intimate Insights of a Childhood Weirdo. She is co-translator and co-editor (with Brenda Werth) of the volume, Fauna and Other Plays by Romina Paula, forthcoming with Seagull Press in 2023. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment of the Arts, National Endowment of the Humanities, New York State Council for the Arts, and the NYC Women's Fund for Media, Music, and Theatre award by the City of New York Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment in association with the New York Foundation of the Arts. aprilsweeney.com