Rate My Professor Hilary Halba

Associate Professor Hilary Halba serves as Convenor of Performing Arts and Associate Professor of Theatre Studies in the School of Performing Arts at the University of Otago. She holds a Diploma in Teaching (DipTchg) and a Master of Arts (MA) from the University of Otago. Halba studied acting and the teaching of acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater in New York City, becoming one of New Zealand's only accredited teachers of the Meisner Technique. Her research interests include bicultural theatre in Aotearoa/New Zealand, actor training, verbatim and documentary theatre, study of acting methodologies, and New Zealand postcolonial theatre in theory and practice. She contributes to international theatre journals, presents at national and international conferences, and served as a keynote speaker on documentary and verbatim theatre at the 2010 'Acting with Facts' conference at the University of Reading, UK. In 2009, she was guest co-editor of Australasian Drama Studies special edition (issue 55) focusing on the theatre of Aotearoa and the Pacific. Halba supervises postgraduate students on topics such as the creation of documentary and verbatim theatre.

As a professional actor and theatre director, Halba is a founding member of the southern bicultural theatre collective Kilimogo Productions and Dunedin-based Wow! Productions Trust. She has directed works for Kilimogo Productions, appeared in over 25 professional theatre productions across New Zealand, and toured Europe in 2010 with Quartett Theatre Company as director of Gary Henderson's Skin Tight and actor in Mo and Jess Kill Susie. Notable acting roles include Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room, Samuel Beckett's Play, April de Angelis's Jumpy at Fortune Theatre, Stuart Hoar's Backwards in High Heels at Circa Theatre, and Paul Baker's Winston's Birthday at Court Theatre. She received the Best Female Performer award at the 2012 Dunedin Theatre Awards for Play and was named Dunedin's best actor of 2003 by the NZ Listener for Three Days of Rain. Key publications include co-editor (with David O'Donnell) of Acting in Aotearoa (2025); 'Play, but don't play games!: The Meisner Technique Reconsidered' (Theatre Topics, 2012); 'Performing identity: Teaching bicultural theatre in Aotearoa' (Australasian Drama Studies, 2010); 'Poetry, Politics, the Past and the Present: Interweaving Maori Postcolonial Theatre with Brecht...' (Journal of New Zealand and Pacific Studies, 2015); 'Theatre as an Artistic Intervention in Post-Trauma Situations: Hush...' (2014); and 'Let me feel the magic' in Performing Aotearoa (2007). Her scholarship has garnered 73 citations on Google Scholar.