About The Drama League
Our Mission
The Drama League is the preeminent creative development home for directors, offering access and opportunity to them, their collaborators, and the audiences they inspire across the world.
The Drama League helps artists and audiences in the following areas:
The Drama League opens doors for exceptional stage directors by providing time, resources, and space to work without restriction, while augmenting skills through personalized training, production opportunities, and professional development. The Drama League carefully selects directors whose vision and talent are unparalleled, with a clear commitment to the craft, the field, and audiences. Through our work, The Drama League celebrates the important role theatergoers have to the future of the industry, and champions the impact theater plays in civic life.The Drama League breaks the formidable barriers that impede success in the arts. We actively work to create a cultural landscape where every artist is considered on their merits. In doing so, we take action to support directors who have traditionally been denied opportunities.
These directors, nurtured and empowered by The Drama League’s support, are trained to create the most rigorous work possible, as a live exchange between artists and audiences. In doing so, we elevate the conversation, deeply impacting theaters and their communities. Bringing people together to celebrate difference, share experiences, and discover common ground are crucial needs served by the work of Drama League directors. This necessary cultural practice is the foundation of our shared humanity.
Now, more than ever, the theater demands articulate proponents for its urgency, resonance, and universality. As arts participation continues to decline nationwide, Drama League directors are fully prepared to lead the industry in renewed responsibility to its audiences, delivering heightened relevance, vibrancy, and accessibility to the field. Only to the extent that the field embraces its dedication to audiences –and the role it can play in uplifting and connecting those audiences through their work – will the industry remain a vital element of civilization.
Our Values
- Position creativity as a powerful engine for change.
- Embrace artistic risk-taking, innovation and surprise — mistakes inspire solutions.
- Insist on the conditions for artists and audiences to engage with thoughtfulness, care, openness, and empathy.
- Strive to communicate openly and honestly, and expect others to do so as well.
- Actively foster and advance a welcoming, fair, and supportive practice free from bias in our programs and on our team, including artists who have been marginalized in our field and our society.
- Seek to inspire through service, and create opportunity for those in our communities to engage, learn, grow, and prosper.
The opposite of war isn’t peace. It’s creation.
Jonathan Larson
The present was an egg
laid by the past
that had the future inside its shell.
Zora Neale Hurston
The Drama League is a community of artists and everyday people who support the work of directors. Directors impact every facet of modern life across the world – arts, culture, society, entertainment, business, technology, tourism, education, hospitality, leadership and more.
Everywhere — in every tradition, in every historical period — human beings have found meaning in our existence by telling each other stories. Every day, in millions of ways both visible and invisible, directors are leading teams to tell us stories in the most joyful, compelling, and surprising ways.
As we set our vision and values to best serve this community, as always, The Drama League turns to artists for inspiration and strength. As Jonathan Larson says, the act of artmaking is fundamentally one of peace; it requires creativity and imagination to generate solutions, and offers alternative paths to living that can be explored safely. Zora Neale Hurston eloquently reminds us that our present is only possible because of our past, and the future will be born from the ethical and creative actions we take today.
At The Drama League, we uplift voices that need to be heard — including all of those who haven’t been before — so that we all may connect, question, and create a better, more just world. The Drama League stands for fairness and against all acts of hatred and systems of oppression, as they are wholly antithetical to the creation of art.
We are committed to providing resources and opportunity to those who need them; a safe space for artists to make work free of restriction, repression, and injustice; and the energy of a community that believes art, and artmakers, hold the key to collective prosperity.