Shaping Stories. Creating Impact.

Tea Alagić Studio

EDUCATION & ARTIST DEVELOPMENT

Advanced Directing Class – Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Contemporary Theatre and Performance (MFA)
School of Drama, College of Performing Arts, The New School

Tea Alagić Studio operates a parallel educational initiative dedicated to sustained, high-level professional development for working artists.

Through masterclasses, workshops, and mentorship, the program supports actors, directors, writers, and interdisciplinary creators navigating the space between formal training and long-term practice.

The focus is on:

  • rigorous engagement with text and performance
  • cross-cultural and interdisciplinary exchange
  • mentorship across generations
  • the development of artistic accountability

Particular attention is given to artists shaped by displacement, migration, and political conflict.

Education is not auxiliary—it is foundational to the company’s mission.

Tea currently serves as a Professor in Directing at The New School in the College of Performing Arts, School of Drama at both the MFA and BFA levels. She has been a faculty member at The New School since 2012, offering approximately six courses per year and continuously advising MFA directing theses. She served as the Department Chair and Head of Directing between 2016-2020. During her tenure, she created partnerships between the New School and NYU, and with the Schaubuhne Theater in Berlin, and has brought in many prominent guest artists to work with students and the school, including Daniel Alexander Jones, (Playwright) Kate Volk (The Wooster Group), Dan Rothenberg (Pig Iron), Jeffrey Horowitz (TFANA), Arin Arbus (Director), Stew Stewart (Tony Awards, Passing Strange), Maiko Chii (Designer), Lauren Yee (Playwright), Portia Elmer (Designer), Geoff Sobelle (Writer and Performer), Anne Hamburger (Producer), Micheal Barker (General Manager), Lisa McNulty (Artistic Director WP), Elevator Repair Service, Tectonic Theater Project, Dmitry Krymov, Daniel Alexander Jones, Pig Iron Theatre Company, and many others.

At the New School, Tea also taught collaboration-based seminars in close partnership with the Playwriting Department, including work with Lucy Thurber (Co-Chair of Playwriting at The New School MFA Program) and the New Voices initiative, focusing on director–playwright collaboration and actor integration. She regularly collaborated across departments with faculty including Todd London and members of the Playwriting and Acting programs, including Peter Jay and Scott Whitehurst.

Tea’s pedagogical emphasis is on the practical skills of both directing and acting – dramaturgy, text analysis and scene breakdowns. Current classes at the New School include Project 1, a producing class focused on budgets, unions, and all the rules of theatre management, CMP 2, a devising work course for actors, a composition focused directing practicum and Advanced Directing with a focus on text analysis, with a final directing project and a public presentation. For further information, see class descriptions below.

Education projects
Composition

This course is a practical, analytical and theoretical class structure as collaboration lab examining all elements of composition in performances arts. Class will have strong homework assignments of reading, writing and research. For the class students will be divided in three groups creating original work on all elements of composition. Work has to be presented as live performance; each piece will have public presentation and critical feedback. The role of audiences is composed from the whole class as well drama school students, faculty and audiences outside of The New School for Drama. Student’s assignment is to invite audiences, announce presentations.

Students will develop short performance pieces drawn from a variety of theatrical and non-theatrical sources, through which they will explore the fullest extent and possibility of performance, building skills as creators, developers, and performers.

CMP2 (Collaborative Making Process 2) continues the students’ exploration and understanding of the collaborative dynamics between actors, writers and directors in the creation, rehearsal and production of new work. By the end of the course participants should have a more sophisticated, experiential knowledge of the development process and be ready to engage their talent in more challenging, ambitious pieces. Writers will have prepared a draft of the plays that each actor and director will work on for the entire semester. Directors and writers will be matched with plays for the rehearsal, development and presentation of the new pieces. At the end of the semester the pieces will be performed for the public.

This course is designed to serve as the central ‘hub’ for MFA directors in their third year. This course focuses on the preparatory creative work required for directors to direct full-length projects, and will also incorporate paper projects tied to related investigations into directors and dramatists. This course takes the form of a close mentorship-based relationship through which third year directors will have their developing creative ideas pushed and challenged as each director hones their unique creative process and style. The course includes pre-production work, based on the play Antigone by Sophocles. Detailed text analysis, casting process, design costumes, set, lights, sounds, projection, directors pitch, budget, production meetings, scene work.

Education projects

TEACHING CREDITS and EDUCATIONAL PRODUCTIONS

2012-present: Professor of Directing, Acting, Playwriting, Collaboration, Design, Production, The New School for Drama, MFA, BFA Program
2025: Professor of Directing I at Barnard College, BA
2023: Professor of Directing at Pace University, BFA
2022: Professor of Directing at Sarah Lawrence College, MFA
2016-2020: Head of Directing Department, BFA and MFA, The New School University
2019: Yale School of Drama, MFA playwriting, Fordham University, BFA in directing
2016: Youth Artists Leadership Summer Program, University of Miami
2012: Directing and collaboration, The PIMA M.F.A. at Brooklyn College
2008-2009: Faculty Adjunct: Acting, Movement, Acting Career Development, Lee Strasberg Institute, NYC
2008: Mentor at the University of Texas, Austin
2007: Assistant Instructor in Acting, David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University Summer Program, New Haven

Education projects