Michael Earley is the Course Director of the UG Certificate in Theatre and Performance Studies and a Panel Tutor for the University of Cambridge Institute for Continuing Education. Until July 2021 he was Dean of the Faculty of Performing Arts and Professor of Drama and Theatre at LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore. He was previously Professor of Drama, Principal and Chief Executive Officer of Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance in Sidcup, London, where he led this top British conservatoire from 2009-17. He is now Professor Emeritus of Drama and Theatre at Rose Bruford. He was previously a Professor of Drama, Head of the Lincoln School of Performing Arts and Producing Director of the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre (LPAC), projects that he inaugurated at the University of Lincoln (UK). An American by birth (but now a dual citizen U.K./US), he had an extensive career in the United States where he was Assistant Professor and Director of the undergraduate Theatre Studies Program at Yale University and on the faculty of the Drama Department at the Juilliard School and on the faculty of Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He did his undergraduate BA studies in English Literature and Drama at Rutgers University and his postgraduate studies in the PhD Program in Theatre, University and Graduate Center, City University of New York. Professor Earley has also worked as Editorial and Publishing Director of Methuen Drama publishers in London, where he published such authors as Arthur Miller, Peter Brook, Sarah Kane, Caryl Churchill, the complete works of Stanislavski, Bertolt Brecht and many more, including two Nobel Prize Literature Laureates: Wole Soyinka and Dario Fo. As Chief Producer of Plays for BBC Radio Drama he directed over 50 productions for broadcast over Radio 3 and Radio 4. His publications have included books on acting and theatre history, including Soliloquy! The Shakespeare Monologues. At LASALLE he more recently directed productions of Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Twelfth Night. At LASALLE College of the Arts, Professor Earley led one of Asia’s top university sector English-language drama programmes that blends Asian and Western practices. He has frequently travelled to China to do workshops that fuse Eastern and Western approaches to acting, theatre training and arts education. He has lectured and presented workshops at Peking University, Shanghai Theatre Academy, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Xinghai Conservatory of Music and Tianjin Conservatory of Music. Professor Earley has been involved in many forms of teaching, both in the classroom and online. In 2008, before going to Rose Bruford College, he wrote the initial course now called Writing Drama (Online) for the Department of Continuing Education at the University of Oxford. He has taught summer courses at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities (the latter for visiting Chinese students). His recent work in Asia demonstrates he is a proponent of multicultural education. He is also an active researcher, recently co-editing a volume called ‘Training Utopias’ of the peer-reviewed Performance Research journal (published by Routledge). He is currently completing a book on movement and the actor for Routledge.
