Rebecca Struch

Biography

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.