Angela M. Farr Schiller

My work is ultimately rooted in revealing the ways that performance can be utilized as a meaningful tool for critical thinking, social justice, and the development of empathy and compassion for the human experience.

Angela M. Farr Schiller, Ph.D., joined the Conservatory in 2022 and is an associate professor.

Dr. Schiller is an Emmy Award–winning director (2021), and a multiple award-winning dramaturg, educator, and scholar. As a dramaturg, she has worked on numerous productions, including the West Coast premiere of Confederates by Dominique Morisseau under the direction of Nataki Garett at the Tony Award–winning Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Additionally, she works as a dramaturg in residence with the Atlanta-based Working Title Playwrights (WTP), the leading new play development organization in the Southeast. As a director, her production of Dreamgirls was nominated for six (San Francisco) Theatre Bay Area Awards including Outstanding Direction of a Musical and Outstanding Production of a Musical (2013), and her production of In the Red and Brown Water won an Outstanding Director Award (2016) from the Kennedy Center College Theater Festival. Her televised production of The Georgia High School Musical Theatre Awards won an Emmy Award (2021) for Outstanding Special Coverage Event. 

As a scholar, Dr. Schiller has presented her research on the intersections of race and performance at Performance Studies International (PSi), the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), and the International Society for the Oral Literatures of Africa (ISOLA). Her published works include The Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays (Bloomsbury, 2021), shortlisted for a national Lambda Literary Award; Troubling Traditions: Canonicity, Theatre, and Performance in the US (Routledge, 2022), winner of the Association of Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) national award for Outstanding Edited Volume (2024); and “Touching Back While Black: Self-Defense and the Politics of Black US Citizenship in Paul Green’s In Abraham’s Bosom” (2023), featured in the international journal Modern Drama. She serves as the historical fashion consultant for the national touring exhibit Clothes Story and was featured in the promo video which aired during the Super Bowl on TBS to over 13 million viewers (2024). Within the field, she served as the cochair of the American Society for Theatre Research’s (ASTR) annual conference in Seattle (2024). Working with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, she gave the opening night talk for their concert version of the musical Ragtime, entitled “Let Them Hear You: Ragtime and the Politics of Race on Stage” at Tanglewood (2023), and followed that up with a talk on Josephine Baker entitled “Black Voices in Cabaret” (2024). Dr. Schiller has two upcoming published book projects debuting: The Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays Volume 2 (2025) and Volume 3: The Young Adult Edition (2026). 

Dr. Schiller received her B.A. in theater from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she completed her final year of study at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. She also studied at the University of Ghana in Accra, Ghana, and the University degli Studi di Siena, Italy. She received her M.A. in Africana studies from the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and completed her Ph.D. in theater and performance studies at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.