Every three years eight actors will be invited into the program based on artistic potential, demonstrated acting ability, vocal/physical flexibility, and respect for a collaborative ensemble engaged in the creative process. The program's goal is to foster inspired, informed, articulate, and versatile artist-actors

Actors become artists when their mastery of performance skills shapes and guides an original and personal point of view of the world, communicating this vision through the characters and compositions they create. Actors require expressive, sensitive voices, flexible, responsive bodies, and lively, agile imaginations. Actors must be ready and willing to transform into character with inventive consistency. The UVa Drama Department approach to training offers an actor a range and depth of classroom and on-stage experience to establish and maintain a fluid, integrated acting process. This approach challenges an actor to adapt and thrive under a variety of coaching and directing styles, design philosophies and performance conditions. It provides an actor with an advanced understanding of theater history, literature, and performance theory as tools for practical character research. It encourages an actor to produce original work vitally connected to community concerns.

The first year is devoted to basic skills acquisition. The emphasis is on truthfulness, simplicity, and freedom. Acting work focuses on impulse-to-action exercises, culminating in the study of relationship. The voice and movement studios concentrate on identifying and eliminating non-productive habits and developing performance strengths with year-long explorations in breath, sound production, speech, alignment, release and equilibrium.

The second year's work focuses on the demands of technical mastery, with an emphasis on precision, power, and expressiveness. Textual analysis and examination of various verse forms will be integrated with a study of Period Styles, Shakespeare, character mask work and stage combat.

The third year provides opportunities to develop original pieces and initiate community outreach projects, along with creating and documenting a thesis performance and honing personal business preparation skills.

The UVa M.F.A. actor is encouraged to practice theater as a collaborative art, looking for parallels to and connections with the work of the playwright, the director, the dramaturge, the designers, and the voice and movement coaches.