Prof. Lev G. Sundstrem,
Rector of the Academy,
Head of the Performing Arts Management Department

Dear Friends!

Once a foreign student was asked to share his impressions on studying at the Saint Petersburg Theatre Arts Academy. "If you would like to do theatre 25 hours a day in the most beautiful city in the world, the Theatre Arts Academy is where you want to be!", he proclaimed.

Indeed, for more then two centuries of its existence - the Academy has been found in 1779, it has fully absorbed the spirit and delights of Saint Petersburg, an acknowledged cultural capital of Russia.

If you would like to take a journey from imperial traditions of Russian theatre to submerging into eventful artistic life of the city today, please look carefully through these pages. Would you like to come for acquiring a Bachelor's or Master's Degree, or Ph.D. in Acting, Directing, or Set Design? Or are you interested in short courses? May be, you are ready to suggest your own master-class or a project of international collaboration between your institution and the Academy?

In any case, the doors are open - choices are limitless.

Let us be acquainted.

Welcome to the Saint Petersburg Theatre Arts Academy!

Prof. Lev G. Sundstrem 
Rector of the Academy
Head of the Performing Arts
Management Department

Prof. Lev A. Dodin,
Artistic Adviser to the Rector,
Artistic Director of Maly Drama Theatre

Dear Colleagues,

When I entered the Academy in 1961, Leningrad Theatre Institute back then, it was the cosiest and the most aristocratic, elegant institution in the city. With only 500 students, it lived as a large - sometimes humorous, sometimes orderless - artistic family, always infatuated with what they were doing. Teachers were dignified by the name of Masters, and it very much corresponded to the spirit of the Institute. The Masters represented the best Leningrad "theatre forces" at the time: Leonid Vivien, a real barin, trilling "r"-sound like French, who worked together with Vsevolod Meyerhold, and my resplendent teacher, Boris Zon, who absorbed all of the best achievements of later Stanislavsky, his teacher, in the most lively way.

In the late 60-s, the times of great changes in the country, I watched the Institute growing rapidly acquiring new departments and new names of the Institute of Theatre, Music and Cinema and then the Academy of Theatre Arts, turning into a huge academic manufacture with almost 1,200 students. A lot of things have changed since then. Yet still according to the tradition, the best directors of Saint Petersburg are drawn to be teachers, or Masters, of the Academy. This is probably one of the Academy's distinctive features that it endeavours to unite academic understanding of a theatre profession based on deep cultural traditions, with all of these up-to-the-minute fleeting perceptions of what life is offering contemporary theatre.

That is why the Academy has always been a birthplace to young theatre companies and studios. It was one of the student groups at the Academy that fostered young artists who stood at the grounds of contemporary company of the Maly Drama Theatre. Being an Artistic Director of the Maly Drama Theatre and a professor of the Academy, I enjoy watching new students eager to study at the Academy, new theatres appearing in Saint Petersburg. And I see the true connection in between - the Theatre Institute, now the Saint Petersburg Theatre Arts Academy, is a living body. It is a place where each year young people bring their talents and hopes, their perceptions of life, time and space, and the Academy is aimed to help these young souls to shape these perceptions, find a way of expression and let them be heard by the world.

You are welcome to join us!!

Prof. Lev A. Dodin,
Artistic Adviser to the Rector,
Artistic Director of Maly Drama Theatre