Andrew Belser Director of the School of Theatre, Film & Television at the University of Arizona. He was previously a Professor of movement, voice and acting in the MFA Performance program at Penn State University. He was the founding Artistic Director of The Gravity Project, a professional theatre company, international performance research center, and new work incubator. Belser’s teaching and professional directing career has centered on movement forms, voice/breath work, interdisciplinary theatre approaches, and solo work. He has directed over 75 theatre productions and maintains an active schedule of tutorials, master classes, and workshops guiding professional actors toward deeper work through an innovative synthesis of: movement, breath, and voice work; attention to seeing, spatial perception, and aligning performance with situated cognition; and sourcing work from active energy centers.
Andy is a Master Teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework® and is also a certified teacher of Open Source Forms® (Skinner Releasing heritage) and a certified practitioner of The Feldenkrais Method®. Andy has extensive experience with other movement forms, including: Contact Improvisation, Lecoq, and Butoh. He was a Doris Duke Fellow in the Amherst Wilder Foundation’s Shannon Leadership Program, and he has served on the selection team for the Fulbright International Senior Specialist program. Belser was awarded the 2003 Pennsylvania Professor of the Year award by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Andy was Director of the Arts and Design Research Incubator at Penn State, a studio where artists and designers join with scientists, writers, philosophers and others to research and create artistic projects for national/international venues. His current research interests include the integration of neuroscience into actor training, and he is working on a book focusing on linking this research with creative practice.