UCC’s Department of Theatre is unique in Ireland, and among the most distinct in the world..

Here at UCC Theatre, we believe in the artistic power of our students. Our students don’t just learn to take direction. They become independent thinkers, makers of work, and arts entrepreneurs who can think outside the box. 

They are adventurers. Our teaching encourages students to explore, to expand, and to refine their skills, knowledge, tastes, and critical thinking. Our students devise. 

UCC’s heritage as a top global university, and its courageous stance toward the future, form the perfect integrated backdrop for how we teach and research, and for how students navigate their time with us. We delight in all forms of theatre, and our teaching explores how theatre and performance, indeed, how the mind and body working together, when daring to tell stories in new and fabulous ways, invent new futures for us all.

We believe that theatre and performance create change. Our research-led teaching means that students are invited right inside how we discover and uncover the processes that underpin the making of performance, and how we think through what we will do with theatre and performance in order that it have the brightest cultural future. This might sound pie-in-the-sky, but we are a department grounded in the reality of today’s performance world. Our faculty include prolific performance and interdisciplinary artists; experienced project managers, casting directors and producers; applied, youth and educational theatre specialists; deep-thinking theorists; and refined skills teachers. The range and scope of the expertise we represent is reflected in our delightfully diverse teaching offer and the extraordinary scope and rigour of the research we produce.

We are also an unusually interdisciplinary department. The offers in the College of Arts, Celtic Studies, Social Sciences are explored by all students in their first year of undergraduate study, and we value Joint Honours, International-stream, and our special Theatre and Music combined programme as much as we do our Single Honours students. We delight in diversity, and welcome applications from the widest range of ages, identities, and life experiences. Our interdisciplinarity is reflected particularly strongly in our Post-Graduate offers and staff research interests.

Explore our staff profiles to learn more about us and follow the links from our staff profiles to our full research background pages.

Take a 360 VR tour of the Theatre Lab - one of our main teaching spaces - 

And make sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

We welcome you. 

Yvon Bonenfant, PhD

Head of Department