Overview - Art of Acting Studio

Arts and Cultural Events – The Harold Clurman Arts Series

The Art of Acting Studio presents cultural events including theater and dance theater, lectures and symposia, poetry readings and play readings, and jazz and classical concerts, all named after legendary theater practitioner Harold Clurman. The Series grows out of an effort to serve the broader community and to expand the cultural horizons of students, to encourage them as actors to take their place among the greater family of artists, and to grow, through the arts, as human beings. All Art Series events are open to the public.

About the Stella Adler Center for the Arts

The Stella Adler Center for the Arts is a public arts center with an actor-training conservatory at its core. Public programs invite audience members to join us in our quest to understand the human experience through art, to ask what it means to be a theater with a higher purpose and to explore what artists might do in the face of atrocity and injustice.

There are many programs that comprise the Center, from curricular initiatives to public cultural programming to arts justice work. All of these programs, whether they are poetry readings, jazz concerts, dance performances or training programs, share common ideals. We hope that through these programs you experience a provocation to be an engaged and ever-evolving human being, to fall in love with a theater in dialogue with ideas and to join us in a laboratory of the arts.

What began as a single class taught by a single teacher has grown into a multi-faceted cultural organization with day and evening conservatories, a partnership with New York University, a branch in Los Angeles at the Art of Acting Studio and thriving public programs like the Stella Adler Arts Justice Division and Harold Clurman Art Series serving 15,000 people annually. Founded as the Stella Adler Conservatory in 1949, the organization was known as Stella Adler Studio of Acting for many decades of growth and in 2019 transformed into the Stella Adler Center for the Arts.

Our Vision for the Center

The Center is a place that brings great art to everyone and offers it indiscriminately, that is to say affordably, to the world. The center is motivated by a passion to democratize the arts, serve everyone in our society and acknowledge every aspect of the human experience. We throw open the doors and invite audiences and artists of all forms to meet and collaborate in a modern-day, Bloomsbury-like community.

The center is inspired by Stella’s vision of an actor as an ever-evolving, culturally-concerned, socially-engaged human being. A suite of public-facing cultural programs put actors in direct conversation with all of the arts and help to serve the greater community.

The Stella Adler Center for the Arts provides a rich, complex, varied, inspired and provocative environment for students of actor-training programs and audiences alike. It is a bold and challenging vision and a worthy extension of the legacies of Stella and Jacob Adler.

How You Can Help Realize This Vision