ABSTRACT
Designers must create constantly, and usually under strict time constraints. In this chapter, a professor and scenic-designer-turned-MFA-student advocate for teaching critical theory to design students not only to enhance their artistic work, but also to encourage their awareness of how structures of power organize academic and professional theatre. The authors outline projects in a research methods class that test the idea that teaching graduate MFAs to theorize their own work within discourses of materialist theory, feminism, queer theory, et cetera, can prove more valuable than introducing them to sources that primarily serve scholars. Engaging design students as thinkers, collaborators, and writers gives them time to dream “impossible” designs that nonetheless expand their creative abilities.
