University of Notre Dame
The Arts at the University of Notre Dame
Arts and culture are vital to the Notre Dame experience. Whether you attend a sold-out show at the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, visit the newest exhibition at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, participate in community arts projects, perform in a student group with friends, receive faculty mentorship in studio or rehearsal, cheer on the Band of the Fighting Irish, or pause to appreciate the beauty of the Word of Life mural, even a single day on campus offers meaningful arts experiences.
Notre Dame’s mission to nurture the whole person—mind, body, and spirit—makes it a truly unique and welcoming place for artists and arts scholars, arts enthusiasts, and the creatively curious. With state-of-the-art facilities, over a dozen majors, minors, and graduate programs across the arts and architecture, over 1,000 annual arts events, and over 50 student arts organizations, Notre Dame offers countless opportunities for artistic inquiry and creative expression.
Alongside distinguished arts faculty who regularly produce highly acclaimed creative and scholarly work, the campus is enriched by the continuous presence of world-class visiting artists and arts researchers, a growing local arts scene, close proximity to Chicago’s vibrant arts and culture offerings, and a robust network of global partners. This wide-ranging arts ecosystem comes together every two years for a signature festival found only at Notre Dame—the Notre Dame Arts Biennial, a six-month, collaborative endeavor grounded in the visual, spatial, literary, and performing arts.
The biennial is the flagship endeavor of the University-wide Arts Initiative, launched in 2024 to mobilize the transformative power of the arts to advance knowledge, invigorate learning, and transcend conventional boundaries. With an emphasis on interdisciplinary collaborations, the initiative enlivens the campus’s distinctive character. From the classroom to the community center, and from the chapel to the stage, Notre Dame offers a mission-oriented home where the arts foster a sense of belonging and concern for the common good.
a2ru Campus Contacts
Rebecca Struch is the managing director of the Notre Dame Arts Initiative. As a scholar, artist, and educator, her work focuses on community-engaged, site-specific, social justice, and devised performance. Her research has been published in Performance Research, Yale Theater, Urban Geography, and Cultural Politics. Rebecca also devises, directs, and produces performance in both professional and university settings. Internationally, she has trained in Brazil at the Center for Theatre of the Oppressed and has worked with artists, therapists, youth, and health educators in Rwanda and Kenya. In 2023, she was a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute Participant in Preserving and Transmitting American Ensemble-Based Devised Theatre at Pig Iron Theatre in Philadelphia. Rebecca also served three terms as an elected board member of Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed, and she currently sits on the Editorial Review Board of the organization’s open access journal.
In addition to her academic and artistic work, Rebecca has extensive program development and management experience in higher education and regional theatre. In her previous role at the Stanford Arts Institute, Rebecca managed interdisciplinary arts programs that advanced innovative arts research and offered unique curricular opportunities to students across campus. Prior to her work at Stanford, Rebecca was the founding Community Producer at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater. In this role, she designed, implemented, and evaluated a new participatory theatre program, Stage Coach, that engaged 10,000 intergenerational and socioeconomically diverse San Franciscans over the course of two years. While at A.C.T., Rebecca also developed and co-taught a new Citizen Artist program that encouraged M.F.A. acting students to translate their professional training into public impact.
Rebecca holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.A. in Applied Theatre Arts from the University of Southern California.
Michael Schreffler is a scholar of Spanish colonial art and architectural history. His research studies the ways in which objects, images and architectural forms communicated ideas and facilitated governance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He explores these themes in the geographic context of the Spanish monarchy’s two American jurisdictions: the kingdom (or viceroyalty) of Peru, which comprised most of Andean South America, and that of New Spain, which extended northward from Panama into the southwestern USA and also included the Philippine Islands.