Amanda Olmstead
Dr. Amanda Olmstead has been an Adjunct Faculty in the School of Drama here at Carnegie Mellon since fall 2019. She teaches the Foundations of Drama 2 and Musical Theatre History courses.
She received her PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Pittsburgh, her MA in Performance Studies from New York University, and her BA in Theatre with a minor in Dance from the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on theatre history, choreography, embodied dramaturgy, and performance as a tool for communication. Dr. Olmstead has published an article titled “Développé: Katherine Dunham’s Diasporic Dance” in the Studies in Musical Theatre Journal. Soon, she will have a chapter titled “Dance as Narrative: Storytelling Through the Ensemble Body” for a new collection titled Dance in Musical Theatre: A History of the Body in Movement (to be released in December 2023). In addition to teaching at CMU, she also currently teaches as part-time faculty for the Theatre Department at the University of Pittsburgh (performance & history, literature, & criticism courses) as well as for the English, Literature, and Communications department at Golden Gate University (college writing & media communications courses).