SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION
Changing Landscapes in Directing and Choreography in Higher Education: Reflections on a Decade of the Peer-Reviewed Section and New Paths Forward BY ANN M. SHANAHAN + EMILY A. ROLLIE, CO-EDITORS
Introduction: Looking Back and Forward As the SDC Journal Peer-Reviewed Section (PRS) recently marked its tenth year in print, we as co-editors look back on a decade of growth and change—within the PRS itself, within our own professional trajectories, and across the wider landscape of directing and choreography in higher education. When we and other members of the Directing Focus Group at ATHE launched the PRS with Laura Penn and other SDC leaders in 2014, printing our first section in the Journal in Summer 2015, we did so to fill a need that persists today: to create a space where directors and choreographers could share work that travels across practice and scholarship, stage and classroom, higher education and the profession, and the many potent spaces in between. Along with other editors and members of the PRS Board, over these ten years our careers have evolved through new institutions, new areas of expertise in the fields, new administrative and leadership roles, retirements, and deepening scholarly and artistic commitments. These shifts have given us vantage points from which to observe how much the fields of directing, choreography, theatre pedagogy, and scholarship have been changing—and how the PRS might change alongside them to best fill our mission. This editorial essay surveys the terrain of those changes. We reflect on the converging pressures and opportunities that have shaped directing and choreography in academia over the last decade: the COVID-19 pandemic and its lasting effect on health and safety protocols in practice; the rise and institutionalization of intimacy direction; shifting casting practices; new attention to labor ethics and student well-being; and the ethical demands brought to the forefront by movements for racial justice and #MeToo. Along with these larger cultural and political issues that have informed the work of the SDC Journal PRS is a raised consciousness of the ethics of labor in publication, the shifting nature of the academic tenure economy, and an increase in non-tenure track positions with heavy teaching loads and less emphasis on research or creative activity for scholar-artists employed in these positions in the academy. In these new economies, we ask how we can meet our still urgent, more complicated mission. Alongside the call for submissions for the Peer-Reviewed Section, we offer a survey requesting feedback about how the PRS can better serve SDC Members as readers and as contributors. As a possible new format, we share processes and case studies from our own productions directed across a range
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SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION | WINTER 2026
of institutions and roles in theatre in higher education (director, intimacy director, artistic director, department chair, and producer) and processes. In these examples, we lift up the intersections between theory, practice, and pedagogy to illuminate how these aforementioned intersections materialize in the rehearsal room, classroom, and on stage. As the PRS celebrates 10 years in print and looks ahead to the future, we also outline an expanded and forward-looking call for submissions to the PRS, including new lenses and formats to help shape the next decade of the section. Our goal is to draw from our broadening perspectives and to continue building a publication that supports Members working in the fertile intersetions between higher education and the profession.
Ten Years of the PRS: Mission, Maturation, and Changing Contexts When the PRS was conceived, its mission was clear: to publish peer-reviewed work by directors and choreographers that blended scholarly frameworks with the lived, embodied realities of our crafts and the training for them. The section’s distinctiveness lies in this dual commitment. Essays are academically rigorous, with references to theory, yet rooted in practice and training; they speak to professional artists who teach, teachers who direct, scholars who choreograph, and students of these and related practices. Additionally, each essay was accompanied by a book review— amplifying research and publication in the field and serving as yet another avenue for publication for directors and choreographers in the academy. Book reviews have been faithfully edited by Kathleen M. McGeever for eight of these 10 years, along with Associate Book Review Editor Ruth Pe Palileo. With this content, we aimed to serve the many Members working in higher education, including Associate Members, a category of affiliation with SDC that emerged early in the history of the PRS and adjacent to its efforts to reach directors and choreographers who worked in the profession and in educational contexts. Over 10 years, this mission has remained steady, but its applications have widened. Where early submissions often foregrounded production case studies or theoretical analyses of directorial approaches, more recent submissions reflect a field grappling with ethical and structural change: antiracist practices, intimacy choreography, trauma-