University of Notre Dame
The Arts at the University of Notre Dame
The University of Notre Dame’s arts environment is rich and integrated, with the centerpiece of its visual arts infrastructure being the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, which opened in late 2023. The Museum features 23 galleries, a multi-story sculpture court with abundant natural light, an Object Study Room, Teaching Gallery, Learning Commons, and even a chapel, Mary, Queen of Families, for contemplation and sacred rites.
Performing arts at Notre Dame find a home in the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, which contains five varied performance spaces: the Patricia George Decio Theatre, Leighton Concert Hall, Reyes Organ & Choral Hall, Browning Cinema, and the Philbin Studio Theatre. Beyond audience spaces, the Center houses a scene shop, rehearsal hall, classrooms, recording and editing labs, and faculty offices for both large-scale public performances and experimental work. Musical training is further enhanced by O’Neill Hall of Music and Sacred Music, which houses the Department of Music and Sacred Music. The Notre Dame choirs (including the Chorale, Men’s Glee Club, Liturgical Choir, Magnificat Choir, and Folk Choir) perform regularly in venues such as the Reyes Organ & Choral Hall and the Basilica of the Sacred Heart. Furthermore, architecture and design students benefit from Walsh Family Hall. It provides studios, workshops, the architecture library, and a public plaza, aligning with the Arts Gateway vision. The campus’s arts venues extend beyond performance and exhibition halls, including Washington Hall, a 550-person auditorium used for events staged by student groups and departments, and Penote Performer’s Hall, a smaller recital and rehearsal space. Notre Dame also supports student-led arts engagement through clubs and organizations such as Opera Notre Dame, PEMCo (student-run musical theatre), and Student Players. Outside of the classroom, in August 2025, over 500 students gathered for Art Attack to discover arts opportunities from 33 campus groups, experience live performances and readings, and participate in hands-on artmaking. Thanks to a generous donation from BLICK Art Materials, eight winners also went home with new art and writing supplies as Notre Dame continues to foster a thriving student arts community!
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.