James Bundy to Step Down From Positions at David Geffen School of Drama and Yale Repertory Theatre

James Bundy, who has served Yale since 2002 as the fifth Elizabeth Parker Ware Dean of David Geffen School of Drama and fourth Artistic Director of Yale Repertory Theatre, will step down from these positions on June 30, 2026. Upon his retirement, he will continue to teach at both the Geffen School and Yale College. 
 
“We offer profound gratitude to James for the myriad ways he has transformed the dramatic arts at Yale over these last two decades,” said Yale University President Maurie McInnis and Provost Scott Strobel in a message to the university community. “We estimate that more than 1500 students have received a world-class theater education under his leadership—and scores of faculty, staff, alumni, artists, and visitors have benefitted from his dedication to making Yale a center of theatrical excellence.”
 
“When I started in this job, mentors assured me that the greatest reward of teaching was learning from students. Those mentors were right as far as they went, but few of them could anticipate the scope of the Geffen School and Yale Rep and their attendant learning opportunities,” James Bundy said. “That scope stays with me: I feel a near-overwhelming sense of gratitude to all of the  students, interns, faculty, staff, alumni, friends, members of the Board of Advisors, guest artists and artisans, donors, audience members, critics and reporters, university colleagues and professional colleagues, in Connecticut, across the United States, and internationally, who have enriched my life over many years.“
 
James Bundy’s unprecedented run––no prior dean of the school has served more than 13 years––is marked by outstanding achievements as an artist, administrator, teacher, and fundraiser. His visionary leadership has fostered extraordinary advancements in graduate conservatory theater training and professional practice, fundamentally transforming the Geffen School and Yale Rep and positioning both institutions for ongoing field leadership. 
 
In his role as dean, James transformed the leadership structure of the school, recruiting associate and assistant deans of diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences to support strategic and operational planning. He has welcomed eminent theater artists and managers to Yale in teaching and leadership roles, appointing all ten sitting chairs of the school’s programs of study. To ensure the continued vitality of the relationship between Yale Rep, the school, its alumni, and the field, he has cultivated DGSD’s Board of Advisors, established in 2002 and comprised of leaders, including many Yale alumni, from a wide variety of disciplines. 
 
Throughout his tenure, James and the school’s leadership team have emphasized organizational, artistic, and personal engagement with vital questions of social justice; the school’s curriculum and training have broadened to include anti-racist and anti-oppressive practice, centering well-being, inclusion, and equity for theater makers and audiences. 
 
James’s strong leadership was particularly evident during the COVID-19 pandemic. When public health guidance prohibiting in-person gathering became incompatible with producing live theater, the school temporarily lengthened its three-year MFA training program to four years. This additional year of training, optional for matriculated students and mandatory for the then-incoming class of 2024, was fully funded by the school and provided students with meaningful production assignments, a core tenet of the school’s conservatory training. 
 
As artistic director of Yale Repertory Theatre, James has immeasurably enriched the cultural life not only of the Yale campus and New Haven, but of the American theater at large. Since his appointment, ten Yale Rep plays and musicals have been honored with the Outstanding Production of the Year Award by the Connecticut Critics Circle. The organization has recognized James with the Tom Killen Award, in recognition of his lifetime of dedication to the theater and to theater in Connecticut, and the 2023 Outstanding Direction Award for his revelatory staging of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? He also directed acclaimed productions of Assassins by Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman, Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days starring Dianne Wiest, and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet starring Paul Giamatti,
among others.  
 
He produced four plays that advanced to Broadway––Radio Golf, the final installment of August Wilson’s epic American Century Cycle; The Realistic Jones by Will Eno; Indecent by Paula Vogel; and Mary Jane by Amy Herzog––which received a total of eleven Tony nominations and two Tony Awards; and two finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama: Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House and The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow by Rolin Jones 
 
Yale’s Binger Center for New Theatre, established in 2008 and permanently endowed in 2012, is one of the nation’s most robust and innovative new play programs. To date, the Binger Center has supported the work of more than 70 commissioned artists and underwritten the world premieres and subsequent productions of over 30 new plays and musicals at Yale Rep and across the country. 
 
David Adjmi, Christina Anderson, Billie Joe Armstrong, Sivan Battat,  Lileana Blain-Cruz, Bill Camp, Gavin Creel, Charles S. Dutton, Marcus Gardley, Danai Gurira, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Kenny Leon, Tracy Letts, Jiehae Park, Mandy Patinkin, Parker Posey, Bill Rauch, José Rivera, Charise Castro Smith, Tori Sampson, Rebecca Taichman, Sanaz Toossi, Sam Waterston, and Robert Woodruff are among the other field-leading visiting artists whose work has graced the Yale Rep stage during James’s tenure. And to foster a meaningful connector between the distinguished guest artists working at the Rep and the current student body, James established the Beinecke Fellows program, placing the art form’s present in lectures and classes with its future.
 
Perhaps the most profound hallmark of James’s tenure is his contribution to the transformational philanthropic support for the dramatic arts at Yale. Since becoming dean, he has played a lead role in establishing seventy of the school’s ninety-one named scholarships, and in 2008, DGSD began offering students in the playwriting program fully funded tuition and living expense stipends. Most significantly, in 2021, the school received $150 million from the David Geffen Foundation––the largest single gift in the history of the American theater––eliminating tuition for all degree and certificate students in perpetuity. Just this year, a student travel fellowship was endowed, which will provide students with opportunities for summer travel to experience world theater, meet with International Artists, and develop a broader perspective on the artform. 
 
Further, James has relentlessly worked to remove one of the only remaining barriers to the school’s historic claim of unparalleled excellence by improving the physical plant. To date, he has collaborated with university leaders to raise more than $100 million toward a new Dramatic Arts Building. This landmark facility will serve as home to David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, Yale Repertory Theater, and the undergraduate Program in Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. It will also provide dedicated rehearsal space for the Yale Dramatic Association. 
 
This spring, the provost’s office will form a search advisory committee to help identify candidates for the next dean and artistic director of David Geffen School of Drama and Yale Repertory Theatre.