ACTOR
Megan Shea has performed with Hudson Valley Shakespeare, Capital Classics Shakespeare Festival, Ithaca Shakespeare Company, and Title:Point Productions. She specializes in both classical theater and experimental performances. Favorite roles include Mrs. Webb in Thornton Wilder's Our Town (dir. John Christian Plummer), Mr. Middle in Title:Point's Field 309 (dir. Theresa Buchheister), Luciana in Shakespeare's A Comedy of Errors (dir. Arthur Feinsod), and Vilma in Vaclav Havel's Temptation (dir. John Gronbeck-Tedesco),
WRITER
Megan pursues a variety of writing projects, both creative and scholarly. Her book Tragic Resistance: Feminist Agency in Performance (Routledge 2025) interrogates how theatrical and performative resistance works and why performance might be a vehicle for altering patriarchal structures that withhold agency from women and trans/genderqueer+ people. Her articles on feminist performance have been published in Theatre Journal and The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. She also researches creative and anti-oppressive pedagogy and has published research on these subjects in Theatre Topics and Pedagogy. Megan's gender-bending play Penelope and Those Dang Suitors was selected as a 2018 winner in Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival’s ten-minute play contest. Current writing projects include a play about Ophelia and a play drawn from Megan's experience as a member of the National Ski Patrol.
For the past 17 years, Megan has been a full-time professor of writing at New York University. She teaches Writing as Inquiry and the first-year plenary in the Tisch School of the Arts. Megan also serves as a mentor to new faculty. She was the recipient of the NYU EWP Teaching Design Award in 2025.
EDUCATION
Megan received an M.A. and Ph.D. in Theater Arts from Cornell University, where she had minor concentrations in Directing and Film/Visual Studies. Her dissertation was chaired by Dr. Timothy Murray. Earlier, she obtained an M.A. with distinction in Theater from the University of Kansas. For undergraduate work, she graduated cum laude with a degree in Theater and Dance from Trinity College, Hartford. Megan also studied with Wlodzimierz Staniewski at Gardzienice in Poland, Stacy Klein/Carlos Uriona/Matthew Glassman at Double Edge Theatre in Massachusetts, Richard Digby Day at the National Theater Institute, Sergei Desnitsky (Moscow Art Theater), David Feldshuh/Beth Milles at Cornell University, and Bartlett Sher while at Trinity College.
photo by Michael Kushner
