The video is a promotional interview featuring faculty, students, and projection design instructor Jared Mazzocchi discussing the University of Maryland’s Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center and its performing‑arts education. It highlights the university’s Research I status and its mission to reinvent art forms, the three‑year MFA Design program (costume, scenic, lighting) that blends conceptual development with professional‑grade technical training (ETC line equipment, ION lighting board, projection design). Faculty members who are active industry professionals—such as Tony‑award‑winning designer Brian McDevitt—provide mentorship and real‑world connections. Students create projects like foam‑core mini‑stages, exhibit work at the Studio Theatre in Washington, DC, and receive exposure to Broadway designers, artistic directors, and production managers. The program emphasizes interdisciplinary collaboration across music, dance, library, and performance studies, and offers classes on the business and art of collaboration. Alumni report internships, tours with professional groups, and multiple job offers before graduation, underscoring the strong career pipeline. The overall narrative portrays a supportive, artist‑first community that balances rigorous academic research with hands‑on industry experience.
Chapters
When I first came down here, I said it's, it's the best-kept secret, this university.
We are housed here at the University of Maryland in what is called the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center. It is probably the premier performing arts center in the country.
We're a Research I university, and if you take that seriously and literally, that means what we should be doing is trying to reinvent the art form, not just teach the art form in the sense of this is how it's been done, but this is how it's— this is where it's going.
My name is Jared Mazzocchi, and I teach projection design.
For this project, we were assigned to create a mini stage out of foam core in which we can use as a projection surface for videos that we've created. Videos that I can combine using Isadora so that I can manipulate them based on the action that's happening on stage.
Particularly with projection design here at Maryland, the support system both in the shops and the faculty is incredible. We're throwing people into the fire really quickly and having support around them to say, look, experiment. Don't just come up with a great idea, but like, let's support risk-taking and let's really try and see what happens.
The one common thing that's always been here since I came here was faculty who actually work in the outside world. I'll take Brian McDevitt, for example. You know, he's won 5 Tony Awards. You would think a guy like that would be like aloof and like, you know, a god figure. And I know his students adore him, but I think one of the reasons that they do is not because of his 5 Tony Awards. They do it because he's available, he's accessible, he takes them on things, he's a great mentor. That's true of, I mean, I could just go down the list. I mean, there's all the people in design are that way, the people in the performance area are that way.
MFA Design is a 3-year program that you enter into the program specializing in one area usually, either costume, scenic, or lighting design. You take basic classes that deal with how do you strengthen your concept of what a show should be, meaning how to tell the story better through light.
So we have really odd angles, very black and white. You don't really see any color at all.
Everything at the University of Maryland here is ETC line equipment, and so the board is an ION, which is the same thing that most of the spaces have, or it's the baby brother of the larger board that some of the spaces have also. And it's the same standard board that's used anywhere in the professional theater world.
We display all of our work at Studio Theatre. Down in DC.
We set up a big display in their lobby and everybody in the area, some people from New York come. We invite 3 Broadway designers to come, one from each discipline, to come and look at the work.
I talk to artistic directors and production managers, designers themselves, and they always tell me that they look forward to the design exhibition every year.
I'm so gung-ho about like, let's just get you out there We have somebody out in Milwaukee. I have one of my undergraduate students on tour with the Builders Association right now.
You may be assisting one of your mentors in a professional show. My students come with me to New York.
I was the assistant set designer for The Tepes. It's directed by Aaron Posner and Teller from Penn Teller, and Dan Conway, my mentor, did the set for it. It was built in Boston and shipped to Vegas. What I learned is like how to to execute a design of that grandeur for a show that complex.
So I just came from a professional design meeting downtown, and I'm currently compiling my old research into new research to help further the idea and based off the reactions of the directors and the teams. And this is a piece list. This is how we estimate how much we're going to pull, buy, rent, modify, alter, dye. I have been able to do some professional work while I was in school. And now that we're nearing the end of it, I've actually gotten 5 outside job offers.
I teach a class called The Business of the Business, and I bring in a lot of guests. Big takeaway there, the students come to me and say, like, wow, they have to really worry about putting one foot in front of the other too, don't they? And they're scared too, aren't they? And it's like, yeah. My real focus right now is on collaboration. I just taught a class, it's a new class called The Art of Collaboration. I taught it for the design students. We brought in designers, actors, directors. They had to get inside the actor's shoes and feel what it's like to be out on stage.
We work collaboratively with music, with the library, dance with theater, costume with performance studies as much as possible, so we're all learning from each other, and our students have a facility for being flexible and for understanding different angles of approaching any kind of research. I teach the undergraduate and the graduate courses in in how to teach dance. And that includes a little bit of history, a little bit of somatics, or anatomy and physiology, a little bit about the movement analysis work as well. They do an analysis that says, this is what this person is really good at, this is what they're privileging in their movement communication, and here's what I would help them to achieve that would be new or different or add to the palette.
I actually was resident designer and shop manager for 8 years at a company in North Carolina before I came here, and the reason that I chose this program is because it was artist-focused. You're sort of an artist first and a costume designer second. It was like the only school out of the 5 schools that I applied for that really had the sense of family, and the students were really kind of like, like a cohort, like a family, and really supportive. A supportive atmosphere that I did not see in other schools, and I like that because this is kind of the only time in our life when we get to work with other designers.
The numbers of student to teacher, the number of shows they get to design, the quality of show they get to design, the quality of work, the quality of the portfolio that comes out of here.
