Latest News

Olivier Morel was in his car one day when a story came on the radio about suicide among veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the report, eight to 10 veterans were taking their own lives each day. The news was like a punch in the stomach for Morel, a Notre Dame faculty member whose research focuses on fiction and trauma. “I was trembling,” he recalls. “I was angry, and I felt helpless … I was thinking, ‘This is unacceptable.’”

Read More

There is growing recognition in academia that “screen literacy” is a valuable asset for many scholars—especially those who teach language and literature. To help develop this skill set, the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Film, Television, and Theatre (FTT) has created a new graduate minor in screen cultures. It is open to students in any Notre Dame graduate program.

Read More

The University of Notre Dame’s Department of Film, Television, and Theatre (FTT) will present four plays in its 2011-12 season, beginning Thursday, September 29, with The Secret in the Wings by Mary Zimmerman.

Read More

Meet the Press. Steppenwolf Theatre Company. NBCUniversal. MTV. National Geographic. The Jimmy Kimmel Show. CNN. Entertainment One. NFL Films. Television stations from coast to coast. These are just some of the places where students in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre (FTT) intern as undergraduates, developing industry experience, making invaluable contacts, and getting exposure to a wide variety of career opportunities.

Read More

Jason Laws is a man who writes his own story. When the job he wanted didn’t exist, he created it. Since receiving his political science degree from the University of Notre Dame in 2007, Laws has built a successful career in Chicago as a commercial choreographer, creative director and producer. He’s also carved a niche for himself creating flash mobs—a concept that wasn’t even invented until 2003.

Read More

At this summer’s Venice Biennale—often called the Olympics of the contemporary art world—the U.S. pavilion features a musical ATM, a treadmill atop an upside-down World War II tank, and gymnasts performing routines on airline seats. It was Notre Dame graduate David Hunt’s job to turn the unusual visions of Puerto Rico-based artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla into reality.

Read More

Christine Becker, an associate professor in the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Film, Television, and Theatre, has received the 2011 Michael Nelson Prize from the International Association for Media and History for her book It’s the Pictures that Got Small: Hollywood Film Stars on 1950’s Television.

Read More

The Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival (NDSF) will present Pericles by William Shakespeare as part of the 2011 International Youth Arts Festival from July 3 through 11, 2011. Directed by NDSF Ryan Producing Artistic Director Jay Paul Skelton, the production features an international cast and crew that includes two students from the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre.

Read More

When Notre Dame senior Dan Jacobs signed up for an elective while studying in London last year, he wasn’t expecting that his course selection—seemingly unrelated to his industrial design major—would spark the idea for his B.F.A. thesis project, or potentially help thousands of children.

Read More

To explore the interplay between one television director’s work and the fan culture it inspires, Notre Dame seniors Stephanie DePrez and Ellie Hall traveled to Southern California on Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program grants from the College of Arts and Letters’ Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts.

Read More

Raise the curtain, cue the lights, and enter our scene: an actress who discovers a hidden passion for costume design, a dedicated designer who seizes a prime opportunity, and the department where it all happens. This is the true story of seniors Lucy Lavely and Robert Jenista, theatre students in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre (FTT), who played major design roles in the spring 2011 production of Proof.

Read More

The Elect, a documentary by University of Notre Dame undergraduates Erin Zacek and Dan Moore, has been selected to screen at the prestigious Los Angeles Film Festival.

Read More

Filming in and around 8,000 sheep, directing first-time actors who also happen to be immediate family, and scrambling across badger-ravaged fields on dark December nights—it’s all part of the movie-making process for senior Film, Television, and Theatre student Javi Zubizarreta.

Read More

“Toi, toi, toi” is a superstitious invocation of opera singers, meant to encourage a winning performance before taking the stage. “We don’t say, ‘Break a leg,’” fifth-year senior and University of Notre Dame Chorale member Joshua Diaz explains. Diaz might be hearing that old stage charm at an extraordinary venue later this month—the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome—where he and about 50 other members of the Notre Dame Chorale are scheduled to perform for Pope Benedict XVI and the bishops and pilgrims in attendance at a general audience on May 25, 2011.

Read More

It has been “a blessing and a journey”—and one that happened almost by chance, says Notre Dame senior Ryan Belock, whose passion for the arts led him to pursue majors in music and graphic design and theatre.

Read More

In the Department of Art, Art History, and Design, graphic design students learn to combine visual arts and technology in a way that transcends words and pictures. Recently, several of those students flexed their technical and creative muscles in the Poster Clash contest hosted by the American Institute of Graphic Arts. The results were impressive.

Read More

A group of advanced industrial and graphic design students at Notre Dame dove into commercial design this semester, working with Kenneth Cole and Heritage Travelware to develop new luggage concepts, many of which will be put into production for retail sale.

Read More

The University of Notre Dame Department of Film, Television, and Theatre will host the fifth annual Notre Dame Undergraduate Film and Television Conference (formerly the Midwest Undergraduate Film and Television Conference) April 1 and 2 (Friday and Saturday) in the Browning Cinema of the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center.

Read More

The University of Notre Dame Department of Film, Television and Theatre (FTT), in partnership with the Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival, will present William Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona April 5 to 10 (Tuesday to Sunday) in the Decio Mainstage Theatre of the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center.

Read More

Ninjas, mysterious dream worlds, and evil social-networking sites are among the themes that will play out on the big screen this weekend during the University of Notre Dame’s seventh annual Asian Film Festival and Conference. Presented by the Kellogg Institute for International Studies and the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center March 25-26, the festival will showcase five recent animated films from Japan, including two from internationally acclaimed director Satoshi Kon.

Read More

What must we change in order to help us bridge the gap between the world as it is, and the world as it should be? In its first year, the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study (NDIAS)—inspired by the classical values of beauty, goodness and truth—began transforming the academic landscape through an annual conference, lecture series and fellowships.

Read More

According to The Art Bulletin’s recent centennial anthology, Kathleen Pyne’s 1996 article on Charles Freer is one of the top 32 essays “that made a difference to us as art historians and as people”—considered among the “greatest hits” since the journal’s debut.

Read More

The Robinson Community Learning Center has been awarded a $10,000 Better World Books Literacy and Education in Action Program (LEAP) grant for a six-week intensive summer Shakespeare program for inner city youth.

Read More

All of William Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets will be read aloud by University of Notre Dame administrators, faculty and students during Sonnet Fest 2011, a free public event that will take place Monday, February 14 from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. in the Great Hall of O’Shaughnessy Hall on the Notre Dame campus.

Read More

Television plays a role in the daily lives of most Americans—but its impacts can be even greater among the fan groups that spring up around popular shows. To explore the interplay between one television director’s work and the fan culture it inspires, Notre Dame senior Stephanie DePrez recently traveled to Southern California to research and film a short documentary.

Read More

Director Peter D. Richardson, a 2002 alumnus of the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre, won the prestigious U.S. Documentary Competition Grand Jury Prize at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.

Read More

Charlotte Lux, a graduate student in the University of Notre Dame Department of Art, Art History, and Design, is using her skills as an industrial designer to rethink the way breast cancer patients experience a particularly stressful diagnostic test.

Read More

The University of Notre Dame will celebrate Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s 255th birthday on January 27, 2011, by performing his works in the O’Shaughnessy Great Hall from noon to 4 p.m.

Read More

Danielle Beverly, a visiting assistant professor of filmmaking at Notre Dame, is headed to the Sundance Film Festival in January 2011 for the world premiere of the documentary Rebirth. Beverly, who began teaching in the University’s Department of Film, Television, and Theatre this fall, spent the last nine years working as the movie’s field producer.

Read More

The University of Notre Dame Band has been awarded the 2011 Sudler Trophy, recognizing “collegiate marching bands of particular excellence that have made outstanding contributions to the American way of life.” The trophy was presented Dec. 17 during the Midwest Band and Orchestra Clinic in Chicago.

Read More