Tiffany Trent
About
Dr. Tiffany Trent is a theatre director and scholar of applied theatre and practical theology. Currently, Dr. Trent is Chair and Associate Professor of Theatre and Drama at the University of Michigan. Her previous administrative roles include Chair and Associate Professor with the Department of Theatre and Dance at Middle Tennessee State University, and Interim Director of Performance Programs at the University of Chicago, her undergraduate alma mater where she also taught in theatre and performance studies for sixteen years.
Trent first embraced theatre in Chicago through new play development (MPAACT, Chicago Dramatists, ETA, Pegasus, plus Alabama Shakespeare Festival and New Harmony Writers Project), teaching artist residencies (Goodman, Pegasus, Chicago Arts Partnership in Education, Illinois Humanities), and understudying (Victory Gardens, Court Theatre). She remains rooted in Chicago and specifically in the Woodlawn community as board president for Definition Theatre Company. Service affiliations for Trent have included the American Alliance for Theatre & Education, the inaugural NOURISH cohort with Goodman Theatre and the Center for Performance and Civic Practice, and Youth Theatre Journal. Reading scripts for Young Playwrights Festival with Pegasus Theatre Chicago is an annual joy.
Trent’s pedagogy enlists embodiment and appreciation for multiple intelligences to advocate for civic arts practice. Beyond campus and classroom, Trent has served faith-based settings and theological spaces of congregations, seminaries, and wider ecumenical interfaith initiatives through facilitating drama as part of liturgy, community engagement, and exegetical enterprise. Aesthetically, Trent’s directing work includes cultural legacies, found objects, and ritual on stage.
For Trent, leadership and theatre require the same ethical framework, quilting together inclusivity, imagination, integrity, collaboration, and respect. Trent’s current scholarship includes a collaboration with University of Michigan professor and playwright José Casas, co-editing an anthology of African American theatre for young audiences plays alongside scholarship from black scholars of youth theatre.
Trent received her BA in Politics, Economics, Rhetoric, and Law from the University of Chicago, an MFA in directing from Carnegie Mellon, an M.Div. from Chicago Theological Seminary, and her PhD in Theatre for Youth at Arizona State University.
