After a national search, the Swarthmore Theater Department is over the moon to announce that our Visiting Assistant Professor for the 2023-23 Academic Year will be Jude Sandy! 

Jude is a  director, actor, movement artist and teacher, born in Trinidad & Tobago and based in Philadelphia, PA. Raised in the bustle of a tropical melting-pot culture, he grew up singing Calypso, folk and choral music, participating in diverse cultural and religious festivals, and masquerading in Trinidad's epic annual Carnival.  Before heading to college, he spent three years as a local newspaper reporter chronicling Trinidad's vibrant arts scene.

Jude studied first at Morehouse College and Towson University and helped found Oakland School for the Arts in Oakland, CA before graduating from Brown University with an AB in Africana Studies and an emphasis in Theatre Arts. Later, he returned to earn an MFA from the Brown/Trinity Rep Graduate Programs in Acting and Directing.

In his evolving professional life, Jude has collaborated on and Off-Broadway and regionally, in productions at Lincoln Center Theater, Barrow Street Theatre, Shakespeare Theatre Company, Guthrie Theater, Cleveland Play House, The Williams Project, and since 2016 as an acting company member and director at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, RI. At Trinity Rep, Jude has directed acclaimed productions of August Wilson's Gem Of The Ocean, Radio Golf, and Marcus Gardley's black odyssey. He has also appeared in principal roles in eleven Trinity Rep productions, playing Othello in Othello, Seymour in Little Shop of Horrors, and Scrooge in A Christmas Carol.

Jude has been a member of the movement faculty at Brown/Trinity, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Theater at Connecticut College, and Visiting Assistant Professor of Theater and Dance at Amherst College. He is currently Lead Faculty Artist with Beyond The Page at Middlebury College's Bread Load School of English, and has guest taught at the National Theater Institute at Eugene O'Neill Center, Boston University, Mount Holyoke College, Berklee College of Music, and others. He is an alumnus of American Dance Festival and American Dance Legacy Initiative's Dancing Legacy.

In 2016 Jude co-founded Denizen Arts, an African diaspora-inspired, LGBTQ+-informed performance collaboration with his partner, dance artist and scholar, Dr. yaTande Whitney Hunter. In 2022 he co-conceived, directed, and performed in Denizen's Philadelphia/world premiere of Walk The (pink) Elephant, a participatory dance-theater ritual, reckoning with histories of loss and survival in Black arts and queer communities through the first waves of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. 

Jude will be teaching acting and mentoring students at Swarthmore beginning in the Fall of 2023. Please join us in welcoming this inspiring artist to campus!