Kurt Daw

Kurt Daw (he/him) is Professor of Theatre Arts at San Francisco State University and formerly served as Dean of the College of Creative Arts there, as well as Dean of the School of Fine and Performing Arts at SUNY–New Paltz. He was the founding chair of the Department of Theater at Kennesaw State University and served as President of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education from 2000–2003.

A specialist in acting pedagogy and Shakespearean performance, Daw is the author of Acting: Thought into Action and Acting Shakespeare & His Contemporaries, and he created a digital edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream designed for performers and practitioners. His recent scholarship includes the chapter “Make Your Best Use of This: User-Experience Design and the Shakespeare Interface” in The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Interface (2022), and the opening essay, “‘Because It Hath No Bottom’: Re-thinking A Midsummer Night’s Dream as an Unstable Theatrical Text”, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The State of Play (Bloomsbury/Arden Shakespeare, forthcoming 2025).

Within the Shakespeare Association of America, Daw was the founding chair of the By-Laws Committee, continues to serve on that body, and has convened three scholarly seminars at its annual meetings.