Performing Arts & Social Justice, BA
Promote positive change through the performing arts. Whether your focus is dance, music, or theater, in PASJ, you’ll approach complex social issues and strengthen communities through practice and performance.
Create and rehearse a piece in the studio, attend seminars, lectures, and performances, work backstage, perform onstage, and discover diverse world cultures as you develop your own voice through the performing arts. Learn firsthand what it means to be a working artist using your craft to advance social justice.
Major Concentrations & Minors
Concentrate in dance, music, or theater. Each requires 48 units: 24 units of foundational courses on the history, theory, and practice of the respective artistic form, and 24 units dedicated to production and collaborative work with a social justice focus. In your senior year, you’ll take a year-long capstone course in which you’ll design an independent, original project based in artistic design, scholastic research, or community-engaged work. You may also minor in dance, music, or theater (20 units).
Dance
Dance students explore the technical, conceptual, compositional, and creative processes underlying dance as an artistic form.
Music
Music students explore the history of different musical forms and styles, develop skills in music theory and composition, take private lessons, and participate in ensembles.
Theater
Theater students study performance skills ranging from acting to playwriting, which makes for a well-rounded performer, onstage and off.
Foundational Courses
There are 20 units of required core courses on the history, theory, practice, and production of artistic forms.
What makes PASJ at USF different?
"USF’s Performing Arts and Social Justice program was one-of-a- kind. I’d never heard of a hybrid university-level program that focused on craft and practice, as well as a lens to socially-engaged academic classes that integrated the arts into learning about various issues affecting communities across the Bay & nation."
— Felicitas Fischer ’19
What’s it like in a PASJ class?
You might study how creative expression has been central to the identities of marginalized groups, or work on a creative performance with community partners. The particulars of a class might change year-to-year based on the teacher’s artistic activism, but in a PASJ course you’ll always be exploring the interaction between your art and justice.
Engaged Learning
Learning is doing. You’ll receive training in your chosen concentration and start performing right away, on and off campus — regardless of experience. All department-sponsored ensembles and productions are also open to USF students of any major or minor.
Equipped to Succeed
With approximately 10,000 for-profit and nonprofit organizations in the U.S. generating more than $13 billion in annual revenue, there’s opportunity in the performing arts. Our graduates leave USF having developed artistic, scholarly, and the professional connections necessary to be a working artist.
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Admission & Aid
Performing Arts & Social Justice, BA
Mon-Fri, 9a.m. - 5p.m.