Rate My Professor Amy Sarno

Amy L. Sarno is an Associate Professor of Performing and Applied Arts and serves as Chair of the Performing and Applied Arts department at Beloit College. She earned a BS in Psychology from St. Andrews Presbyterian College in Laurinburg, NC, an MA in Theatre from the University of Oregon in Eugene, OR, and a PhD in Theatre from the University of Oregon. As a director and deviser, Sarno creates performance works that integrate oral history, archival research, and interactive community workshops to address social justice issues related to gender, race, and violence. Her career at Beloit College includes directing numerous productions and leading innovative projects that engage students and communities in verbatim and documentary theatre practices.

Sarno's key projects include the Beloit Ghost Stories Project (2005), funded by the Wisconsin Arts Board, the Associated Colleges of the Midwest FaCE program, and the Sanger Fund; “Do You See What I’m Saying?” (2007-present), a script devised with members of Beloit’s African American community to reveal untold memories; Surviving (2011), a play created with survivors of domestic violence; Plan B: Love Stories Gone Wrong (2014), an oral history project on family violence developed in Florence, Italy, during her Fulbright U.S. Scholar award in Arts (2013-2014, Italy) and supported by a Mellon Foundation grant for performance at the Crisis Arts Festival in Arezzo; Mediated Women (2014); Insider/Outsider (2015); The Forgiveness Project (2017), a verbatim theatre piece on the Chicago criminal justice system in collaboration with Erasing the Distance; The Holidays Unwrapped (2017); and A Peace of Cookie (2025). She teaches courses including Contemporary Theories of Performance and Media, Acting, Devising, Documentary Theatre, and Taking Action. Her publications comprise "Acting Access" co-authored with Robert Barton in Theatre Topics 6:1 (1996): 1-14; "DAH Theatre’s Angels: Doubling the Directions of Community-based Memory" in Dah Theatre: A Sourcebook, edited by Dennis Barnett (Rowman and Littlefield); and a review of Tactical Performance: The Theory and Practice of Serious Play in Theatre Survey 58:2 (2017): 36. Sarno’s work fosters rigorous dialogue and creative potential in students while contributing to theatre's role in social change through international and local collaborations.