Ohio State dedicates new Theatre, Film, and Media Arts Building

The new home to The Ohio State University’s Theatre, Film, and Media Arts program was celebrated over the weekend with a special dedication ceremony.

The new building is a modern home for the program and replaces the Drake Performance and Event Center. It shares a part of campus that connects the Timashev Family Music Building and the Wexner Center for the Arts.

University leaders helped open the building to hundreds of students, faculty, staff and community members. The opening included a tour of the new building, classroom demonstrations and a visit from Brutus Buckeye.

“This building … is the keystone of the arts district. Today, this area is an asset to our university in so many ways. It helps us engage with the community and state. It’s a centerpiece of our mission as a public land-grant university. And these are state-of-the-art venues which people are always going to want to come to, see productions and see the great work our Ohio State faculty and students are doing,” said Ohio State President Walter “Ted” Carter Jr. “It’s a new home base from which Buckeyes can interface with and serve all of Ohio and it’s going to supercharge collaboration, which goes hand in hand with creativity.”

“The building is also a node in a network of engagement partnerships and internship opportunities for our students, part of a broader effort across our college to lean into the university’s motto of Education for Citizenship,” said David Horn, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. “The building is a site for scholarship for various forms of research, creative projects and interdisciplinary collaborations that have won national and international recognition.”

The five-floor building includes classroom, performance, studio and office space. It also features spaces for students to create, including a multipurpose theatre lab for new and experimental production and theatre studios for scenery, costumes, lighting, and sound.

The building is centered around two state-of-the-art performance spaces, including a 450-seat proscenium theatre and a hybrid black box theatre. Lisa Florman, vice provost for the arts, said the new spaces offered new opportunities to share art and creative expression beyond campus.

“It’s wonderful … to finally have spaces commensurate with the quality of the work being done in them,” she said. “But our strong investment in the arts has also meant that even as we take pride in what we have here on campus, we are able to look outward and to engage with our communities in richer and more meaningful ways than we ever have before.”

As the university continues to grow the TFMA program, the new building includes spaces for students studying film, moving image production and media arts, including two sound stages, editing suites, a sound lab and a screening room. E.J. Westlake, chair and professor of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts, said at their heart, theater and film help explore humanity.

“Theater and film are both about telling stories, stories about what it means to be human beings. Our stories teach us empathy and give us tools to be citizens in a really complicated world,” she said. “Bringing them together teaches us about collaboration and the emotional maturity it takes to give back to our society. We learn to be resilient leaders and curious learners.”