RESIDENCIES AND UNIVERSITY TEACHING

As an Artist-in-Residence at Harvard, Columbia, Duke and NYU, Sabrina Peck has guided students through the process of creating and performing original productions. University residencies have also included teaching academic courses and conducting public lecture/demonstrations. Peck often designs her residencies to bring students together with neighboring communities to collaborate on original works about those places. This experience educates students about the neighborhoods that exist just outside the ivy walls, challenges their assumptions and builds mutual understanding between economically and ethnically diverse populations.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
Center for Jazz Studies, Visiting Artist

In 2021-22, I conceived and directed the dance and community-engagement components of the yearlong, campus-wide celebration of Duke Ellington’s masterwork Such Sweet Thunder. Columbia students assisted me in developing choreography with juniors and teens at the Harlem School of the Arts. I created a performance that set all 12 pieces of the score to original choreography, featuring powerhouses: Madelyn Ho, LaTasha Barnes, Derek Brockington, María de Lourdes Dávila, Omar Edwards, Mercedes Ellington, Orlando Hernández and others

Harvard UNIVERSITY
Office for the Arts, Guest Instructor

Collaborator Amy Brenneman and I co-taught a short course entitled, Performing Our Experience: Tools for Creating Original Theater. We guided students through a wide range of techniques for generating, developing, distilling, shaping and performing their original ideas, drawn from their personal experience. They worked alone and in groups with text, story, movement, character and music. The class was lively, rigorous, inclusive and fun. Read about the course.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, Adjunct Faculty

In Spring 2015 I taught Performance as Inquiry, a course I developed on the history, theory and methodology of socially-engaged theater. The course alternated between the seminar room, in which students discussed and debated; and the studio, where students created on their feet. Students came from a broad range of backgrounds and levels of performance experience. Guest Artists included Laurie Woolery, Associate Director of Public Works, and Playwright Mona Mansour. The course culminated in a showing of work that the class created as a community. These pieces reflected individual identity as well as collective concerns.

BROOKLYN COLLEGE
Department of Theater, Teaching Fellow

As a Teaching Fellow at Brooklyn College, I taught Community-Based Performance to BA theater concentrators. Through collaborative theater-making, case study presentations and readings, students learned methods for creating original performance in collaboration with communities, reflective of those people and places. They also explored this field’s difficult questions, such as those of authorship, responsibility, audience composition and post-project effects. The course culminated in a performance of student work, drawn from their individual and collective experiences.

BROOKLYN COLLEGE
Director, Various Theater

I directed MFA and BFA theater students at Brooklyn College in a variety of theater projects while getting my MFA in directing in 2016. These included:

  • Scenes from by Quiara Alegría Hudes’ Water by the Spoonful, Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Chekhov’s The Seagull;

  • Staged readings, such as Chiori Miyagawa’s A Winter’s Captive; and

  • Full productions, such as José Rivera’s The Winged Man and my thesis production, The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek by Naomi Wallace.

NYU TISCH SCHOOL OF THE ARTS
Visiting Artist Residency

I was invited by the NYU Drama Department in 2001 to teach an intensive semester-long studio course in community-based performance, aided by artistic collaborators. Peggy Pettit and Jan Cohen Cruz. I guided students through a broad range of techniques for creating performance material in collaboration with communities. Outside of class, students traveled to Brooklyn, East Village, Harlem and Hunt’s Point in the Bronx to collaborate with community gardeners and green space advocates. The result was common green/common ground, a large-scale production I about the struggle for green space in NYC, featuring students and community members, performed outdoors.
More about the production, common green/common ground

"Sabrina is an amazing Choreographer, Teacher and Director. I witnessed in her a rare combination of commitment to carry out a vision, and a capacity to yield gracefully to input and feedback, always trying to balance student/actors/artists/community members' passions and idiosyncrasies. I could not have anticipated or imagined that the garden project would turn out to be one of the most joyful, enriching, and artistically satisfying projects I've been involved with..." —Rosemarie Roberts, collaborating artist, cg/cg

DUKE UNIVERSITY
Visiting Artist Residency

The Institute of the Arts at Duke and the Center for Documentary Studies in Durham, NC co-sponsored my residency in 2000. I taught a semester-long course in community-based performance through which students gained a detailed knowledge of different approaches to community-engaged work around the world, past and present. Students also accompanied me into the West End neighborhood to collaborate with teens, seniors, former tobacco field and factory workers, civil rights activists, religious leaders, and other local residents on an original production about the complex history of the neighborhood. The result was Speaking Our Streets: A Performance By and About Durham's West End Community that combined theater, movement and music and performed for a diverse Duke and Durham audience.
More about the production, Speaking our Streets

HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Peter Ivers Visiting Artist Residency

I returned to Harvard, my alma mater, to collaborate with students on a theater production about the experience of coming of age during college years. Students generated material through writing exercises, movement workshops and scenework. Additional texts came from historical letters, old Harvard drinking songs, college textbooks and the like. Several professional artistic collaborators contriubted original poetry, prose and music. The result was The Garden in Winter, a dance-music-theater production that explored the personal journeys of the students through the themes of sleep, falling, separation, and winter--a time of both hardship and unseen growth.
More about the production, The Garden in Winter

Learn about Odakle Ste, created during Peck's residency at a refugee camp in Croatia