The MFA in Dramatic Writing at the University of New Mexico is a three-year program requiring 60 credit hours to complete the degree. The program offers continuing opportunities for producing new work from writers working in the MFA program. These opportunities create an environment where students are either preparing scripts for submission to our annual new works festival called Words Afire, submitting material for production to the local theatre community, or for the season of plays selected by students that is presented in our black-box, Theatre X. The Words Afire Festival presents new work over three weeks in multiple venues on and off campus. Five students in our writing program have won national playwriting awards for the plays presented in this festival, four of them from Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival. Completing this program means you will have created a portfolio of a minimum of 4 scripts (2 full length stage plays, 1 full length screen play, 1 short screen or stage piece). This work will have emerged from the courses in the Writing Core taken by all the MFA Writing students. It involves four intensive semester-long writing seminars that confront the principles and craft of dramatic writing, the resources of the writer's world, and a way of thinking about dramatic work. Perhaps what characterizes this department is the wide variety of work we do and the hunger for doing it which keeps graduate students busy very soon after they arrive on campus. You will not be idle. We will press you for scripts, rewrites, more rewrites and always want to know what have you written for us lately. We will upset you, praise you, challenge you, inspire you and then want even more.
New Mexico is a rare place for the arts. A place artists, in all disciplines, can find a way to see the world from a special perspective.