Visiting Artist
The Spring 2023 Visiting Artist's Seminar - Playwriting Plus: Shifting the Lens to See as a Playwright, Actor, and Director
Enrollment limited to 15 students. Permission of Department will be required to enroll.
- Permit Request Form (You will be asked to log in. Use your Pipeline user name and password.)
Class Dates, five sessions, held in HONR 116 (unless otherwise noted):
- Tuesday, January 17, 2023: 4:30-7:30 p.m. (CST) - meets in HONR 106
- Tuesday, January 24, 2023: 4:30-7:30 p.m. (CST)
- Tuesday, January 31, 2023: 4:30-7:30 p.m. (CST)
- Tuesday, February 7, 2023: 4:30-7:30 p.m. (CST)
- Tuesday, February 14, 2023: 4:30-7:30 p.m. (CST)
Playwriting Plus: Shifting the Lens to See as a Playwright, Actor, and Director
Featuring Dr. Claudia Barnett & Beth Anne Musiker
In this 1-hour honors course, playwright and an actor-director team up to lead a seminar in which students learn to see through various perspectives. Students will learn craft through observation, conversation, and their own creative process. By exploring model scripts and articulating lessons learned, they will come to appreciate the capacity of a play (and the creative team) to communicate for maximum impact on the audience. By staging scenes “on their feet,” they will realize possibilities and potential. By working on a group project in which individual scenes are brought together, students will learn to collaborate, to mesh voices, to create an arc, to map out a play, and ultimately to present a performance that captures the zeitgeist of our time.
About the Artists:
Beth Anne Musiker, a graduate of Northwestern University’s theatre program, started her career in New York as a professional actress, singer, dancer, and musician. Her experience includes more than a dozen years in the New York theatre scene, appearing in touring Broadway shows, regional theatre productions, and overseas. Ms. Musiker is the founder and President of StageSmart Teaching Artists, which provides experiential engagement/education opportunities to Broadway and touring Broadway shows. She also serves as a lead teaching artist for the Tennessee Performing Arts Center’s Education Department. In conjunction with TPAC, she partners with teachers to prepare K-12 students to experience TPAC’s Season for Young People. Recent theatre work includes regular participation in Pipeline-Collective’s new works program, The Salon, as actor and director and writer. She also appeared in the live television broadcast, Outside of Here. She will appear in the Nashville Repertory Theatre’s 2023 production of the musical Violet.
Claudia Barnett writes experimental dramas about women and history and science. Her plays, including Witches Vanish and Aglaonike’s Tiger, have been developed and performed at the Great Plains Theatre Conference, the Ingram New Works Lab, the Kennedy Center Page-to-Stage Festival, Stage Left Theatre, the Tennessee Playwrights Studio, Venus Theatre, and the Women’s Voices Theater Festival. Her collaboration with Pipeline-Collective, Outside of Here, a 12-hour play featuring three dozen performers, premiered as a live broadcast event in October 2021. Her books of plays are published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. A professor of English at MTSU, she teaches Playwriting, Modern Drama, and an Honors survey of contemporary drama called Science Plays (English 2020-H). She’s twice been named Outstanding Honors Faculty (2013, 2017). She created the Visiting Artist’s Seminar for the Honors College and coordinated it for 13 years. She now coordinates In Process: A Creative Writing Event Series.
