Colm is a teaching artist and scholar of performance studies. In 2022, he is teaching in the Drama and Theatre Studies department at Trinity College.

He has worked at Trinity College Dublin and the University of Georgia. His scholarly writing is published in Liverpool University Press, Brill, and Études. He studies practice-as-research, and has given workshops in actor-training everywhere from the National Theatre of Ireland, the Abbey, to the University of Fés, Morocco.

He holds an MFA from Columbia University in the City of New York, where he received the Dean’s Fellowship and was a Shubert Scholar. He graduated Summa Cum Laude from Trinity College, where he read Theatre Studies and the History of Art and Architecture.

Statement of Teaching

My philosophy of teaching, based on a career spanning theater directing, academia and interdisciplinary arts practice, is built on a foundation of access, collaboration and praxis. These three pedagogical pillars acknowledge that the fundamental approach must always be to meet students at the level of their curiosity, imagination and collective experience. This pedagogy is liberating because it recenters the academic experience of theater in education away from object-oriented outcomes (essays/self-tapes/union cards), toward the classroom as a site of deeply shared creativity, self-expression and the recognition of the other.

In my classes, I encourage an open and exploratory atmosphere. The rooms I lead are grounded in discourse, the rigorous investigation and apprehension of novel concepts, and the precise application of theoretical language. These standards encourage a high level of intellectual engagement with material, while fostering respectful cross-discussion and a healthy classroom culture. I hope the questions raised in conversations which begin in my classes last long into the lives of these artists of the future, reverberating in society at large.

In my artistic and academic career, I have worked closely with artists and students who identify along a spectrum of disability. In the classroom, I constantly refocus my strategies to accommodate diverse learners, using a wide variety of teaching methodologies to add value and create access across diverse modes of cognition, paying special attention to experiential and kinaesthetic learning. This blended approach is also true of the assignments I set. I ask for a blend of short response papers, interdisciplinary performance projects, reflective practice (not restricted to the written word), assessed performance projects and essays, prioritizing continuous participation and engagement over exam results.

My practice has exposed me to the ego-shattering, politically emancipatory energy of collaborative work. When a group comes together in the act of collaboration, consensus is dispensed with, and contradiction and dialogue are encouraged. Diverse creative communities become exponentially more dynamic, and the potential for individual growth is drastically increased. The theater is a training arena for our skills in public life - skills that are rapidly waning in an increasingly atomized, digitized, globalized world. As such, my classroom is often busy with in-class formative projects, group presentations and group-led “programming,” in which cohorts are encouraged not only to make their own work, but to steer the process by which that work is created. My goal is to turn cohorts into ensembles, a goal which is crucially important to post-Covid performance pedagogies, in which many students have spent the last two to three years of their development in isolation.

Finally, a core value of mine is the meeting of theory and practice. The schism which exists in contemporary theater education between “conservatory” aesthetics and more interdisciplinary curricula is a fallacy reflective only of the commercialization, instrumentalization, and utilitarian concerns of an education economy increasingly interested in its own justification. My teaching practice rejects such meritocratic concerns in favor of personal, empowering, cross-disciplinary pedagogy. It instead prioritizes access over competition, imagination over box-ticking, and the creative life of its students above all.

Field of Enquiry

Colm studies contemporary performance, with a special interest in Practice-as-Research, contemporary theatre as interdisciplinary arts practice, and trends in 21st Century performance. For a decade, he has developed and co-directed practice-as-research programming and productions at the Samuel Beckett Centre with his collaborator and co-author, Dr. Nicholas E. Johnson, Assistant Professor of Drama at Trinity College Dublin.

Workshops

Colm has created curricula for actor and director training, and taught both college-age and high-school students the fundamentals of theatre-making. He created a workshop for the Abbey Theatre called Acting Beckett, a student-led laboratory which created access to one of Ireland most famous (and most infamously tricky) writers. Colm is currently teaching workshops on Viewpoints, Devised Theatre, and documentary theatre-making.