Acting and Performance with Creative Writing

Acting and performance combined with creative writing is a programme for students who want to develop both as performers and as writers, recognising that the two crafts are deeply connected. Acting and performance train you in the embodied, relational, and interpretive skills that live performance requires: voice, physicality, character, and the ability to inhabit a text or devised piece and communicate it to an audience. Creative writing develops your ability to generate original material, whether for the stage, screen, or page, and to craft language that serves character, story, and emotional truth.

Together, they equip you for the range of roles that the contemporary performance industry requires, from actor-writers who create their own work to collaborators who bring scripts to life.

At the University of Huddersfield, this three-year full-time programme includes a sandwich year with work placement and work placement opportunities throughout. The placement element is particularly valuable in the performing arts, where professional experience and contacts are central to building a career, and it gives you the opportunity to work within a professional context before you graduate. The programme develops both strands in parallel, with studio practice in performance alongside workshops and seminars in creative writing, and you will engage with theatre history and contemporary practice as well as working on your own writing and performance projects.

Huddersfield has a lively creative arts culture and good connections with the regional performing arts and cultural industries sector, and the programme reflects the university's commitment to practical, professionally oriented creative education.

Graduates pursue careers as performers, actor-writers, directors, dramaturgs, workshop facilitators, community artists, and in roles across theatre, television, radio, and digital media. The combination of performance and writing skills is increasingly valued in a theatre industry where the creation of new work, often by performers who write as well as act, is central to the ecology of the sector.