Andrea Stolowitz
My approach to teaching dramatic writing encompasses four basic principles: generating writing, viewing and analyzing produced work, understanding critical analysis, and re-writing. In order to enhance the class offerings, I always bring my work and experience as a professional playwright and screenwriter into the framework of the course.
Because learning to write dramatic literature occurs most successfully through the act of doing it, all of my writing courses, from introductory through advanced, focus on the generation of new work. In the introductory level classes I utilize two kinds of exercises, generative writing exercises which often work off of themes, emotions, pictures, and objects and skill exercises which concentrate on the development of, among other topics, artful dialogue, complex characters, subtext, conflict, stakes, and physical movement in a theater space. The benefit of expecting students to create a large body of writing during the class is that they seldom fall victim to being blocked and trying to create something “perfect”.
A key element of my teaching style employs critique of both professional and student work as a method to strengthen one's own analytic ability and self-assessment skills. At the beginning of the semester most students are uncomfortable and unclear about how to give and receive feedback. For this reason we start with evaluating professional work which we see or read and then gradually move towards analyzing our own work. When critiquing each other’s material, we use the Liz Lerman approach to critical analysis to structure our feedback sessions. The method is based on the artist/scholar asking questions about their own work and therefore taking ownership of the feedback experience. This process often creates a trusting and fruitful dialogue, where the class and the creator are aligned in the same goal: to make the work stronger.
Professionally, I have had my plays developed and produced internationally at such theaters as the Cherry Lane, The Long Wharf, The Old Globe, New York Stage and Screen, and the Mill Mt. Playhouse. I was a Sewanee Writer’s Conference Dakin Fellow in 2005, a Ledig House fellow in 2006, and in 2007 received a North Carolina Arts Grant. My screenplays and treatments have been optioned and sold to independent producers in New York and LA. I served on the theater studies faculty at Duke University from 2003-2007 and at UCSD from 2000-2002.