UUPer in the news

Buffalo UUPer to serve as festival chair — Approximately 18,000 students from colleges and universities nationwide participate each year in the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF), a national program designed to serve as a catalyst for improving the quality of college theater.

Serving as the festival's national chair until 2005 is Catherine Norgren, an associate professor of theatre and dance, and head of design and production for the department of theatre and dance in the SUNY Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences.

Theater, Norgren believes, embodies most of what is essential about a liberal arts education: "Theater strikes me as the most liberal of liberal arts because it encompasses and develops all that the liberal arts epitomize — critical thinking, making connections and articulate communication skills — verbal, written and visual.”

Based at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., KCACTF has grown into a network of more than 600 academic institutions from which theater departments and student artists showcase their work and receive critiques of their performances.