Amy Budd

Amy Budd serves as Associate Professor of Theater at Goshen College. She has worked as a theater artist and educator for nearly thirty years, telling stories with professionals, amateurs, and learners ages 4 to 70+. She began her journey in higher education in 2013, starting graduate school at Purdue University. Upon completion of her MFA, she spent three years at Purdue as visiting faculty and one at SUNY Oswego. At GC, Amy is overjoyed to have found a community that values the spiritual transformation of art making as much as she does.

Amy’s recent projects at GC include plays Everybody by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. She is most proud of 2024’s ensemble developed musical revue, Resistance! Revolution! Reconciliation!

In addition to directing plays, Amy loves formulating new ways to share theater knowledge with fans and fellow artists. For example, in fall 2017, she developed and co-taught a new course at Purdue Univeristy with Dr. John Larson, Professor of History called Hamilton: History, Artistry, Impact. Students in this course studied the historic and artistic foundations of the hit musical and devised new works in its spirit.

Additional directing projects include As You Like It at the Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre; Women Speaking Math (a street performance in protest form) for the City of West Lafayette, and Love And Death, a Shakespearean collaboration with Lafayette Symphony. Amy is interested in bringing images of science and scientists to the stage and using popular forms such as burlesque and rock and roll to explore larger human dilemmas. She delights in finding intersections between classical text and contemporary poetic language.

Amy was based in Providence, RI for 16 years where she worked as a director, costume designer, stage manager, and teaching artist. She directed for the Contemporary Theatre Company, Boston Theatre Marathon, Perishable Theatre, Little Compton Community Center, Brown University’s MFA Playwriting Program (under the leadership of Mac Wellmann and Nilo Cruz), All Children’s Theatre Ensemble, The Manton Avenue Project, and others.

Amy was a 2006-09 Resident Artist at Perishable Theatre, where she developed a full-length performance of her experience as a Von Hippel-Lindau Syndrome (VHL) patient/survivor, The Thing That Ate My Brain…Almost. Amy and her team subsequently toured the show to Austin, Texas and Washington, DC.

As an educator, Amy has worked in public schools, after school programs, day camps, institutional settings, and adult continuing education programs. Most notably, she served as Artist in Residence at Oakland Beach Elementary School in Warwick, RI for eight years, collaborating with students and teachers to devise over 100 original plays and interdisciplinary performance pieces.

Amy holds an MFA in Directing from Purdue and a BA in Theatre from Indiana State University.

www.amylynnbudd.com

At Goshen College

• Theater History I & II (386 and 387)
• Directing (338)
• Audition Technique (335)
• Acting I & II (234 and 334)
• Stage Management (331)
• The Theater Experience (235)
• Theater for Social Change (201, AW)
• Senior Seminar (410, in collaboration with Art, English, and Communications)
• Fine Arts for Children (EDUC 330)
• Identity, Culture, and Community (CORE 100, first year experience)
• Arts in London (455), student life representative

Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre, State University of New York at Oswego

• Devising Theatre-Interdisciplinary Experiments in Performance (THT 470)
• Fundamentals of Acting (THT 130)
• Introduction to Theatre (THT 110)

Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN

• Director and Designer in Collaboration (THTR 545)
• Introduction to Directing (THTR 440)
• Hamilton: History, Artistry, Impact (THTR 390/HIST 302)
• Theatre Appreciation (THTR 201)

• Recruiting and hiring a guest director of color for the Fall 2024 Main Stage play
• Preparing to direct iconic musical Rent at GC in spring 2025
• Developing methodology for teaching theater history from an anti-racist, intersectional perspective grounded in evolutionary science
• Bilingual Theater
• Continuing professional development in best practices for
  • stage intimacy
  • curricular and on stage representation, equity, and inclusion across  race, ethnicity, disability, gender, sexuality, and first language

Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival Region 3 involvement:

Irene Ryan Scholarship Auditions Assistant Coordinator, 2022-present

Regional Production Respondent, 2022- present

Irene Ryan Preliminary Audition Respondent, 2021-22

Facilitates 8-13 GC students attending annual regional festival

Performances directed for the public since 2015: 

Goshen College: 

2024 Resistance! Revolution! Reconciliation! Ensemble Developed musical revue

2023 Twelfth Night; or, What You Will, William Shakespeare

2023 A Comedy Renaissance/La guarda cuidadosa (staged reading, a bilingual adaptation from Miguel de Cervantes)

2023 Into the Woods, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine

2022 Everybody, Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins

2022 The 25^th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Finn & Sheinkin

2021 Orfeo ed Euridice, Glück/Calzabigi. full length opera, performed in Italian. Filmed for streaming. Rehearsed under COVID protocol with zero transmission. Available at https://youtu.be/NHm9UxKjGPk?si=6OHu0PRipCdiAYwo

Other theaters:

2021 Stupid Fucking Bird, Aaron Posner, Vs. Theatre Co., Los Angeles, CA, Zoom reading

2019 The Fantasticks, Jones & Schmidt, State University of New York at Oswego

2019 Human Terrain (reading), Jennifer Blackmer, Summit Performance, Indianapolis

2016 Women Speaking Math, Ensemble Devised City of West Lafayette

Purdue University

2019 She Kills Monsters, Qui Nguyen

2018 Clybourne Park,  Bruce Norris

2017 Cabaret Kander & Ebb

2016 The Secret In the Wings, Mary Zimmerman

2016 The Liar, David Ives adapted from Pierre Corneille (MFA Terminal Project)

2015 Solved/Sleeping  Ensemble Devised

2015 As You Like It , William Shakespeare, Arkansas Shakespeare Theater