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Meet the Interim Dean John Gronbeck-Tedesco

John Gronbeck-Tedesco is currently a professor in the KU Department of Theatre & Film. He arrived at KU in 1979 and served as chair of his department from 1991-1999 and as associate dean in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences from 2000-2006. Gronbeck-Tedesco also served as Acting Director of the University Honors Program.

In his career he has directed nearly 35 plays, including Guys & Dolls, a collaboration between University Theatre and the Department of Music & Dance, Temptation Lonestar, The Accidental Death of an Anarchist, and The Mandrake (which he translated). He is the author of several plays including Prairie Fire, Parts I and II, Coming Here, A Trilogy and Tony and the Telephone Pole. Between 1986 and 2006, Gronbeck-Tedesco was co-founder and editor of the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, for which he now serves as a consulting editor. He is the author of Acting Through Exercises: Journeys for the Actor, published in 1992, which received the "Best Book in Theatre Pedagogy and Practice" award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.

Gronbeck-Tedesco holds a BA in philosophy from San Luis Rey College in Oceanside, California, a MA from California State University at Northridge in directing and theatre history, and a PhD from the University of Iowa in dramatic theory and criticism and the history of rhetorical theory.

"The arts impart experiences that ordinary language, normal social formations and our usual institutions cannot provide or address," said Gronbeck-Tedesco. "One of the missions of art is to communicate what cannot be communicated in any other way. There is an apocryphal story about Bach that makes this point. After performing a new organ composition, a devoted aficionado asked him what his composition was supposed to mean. Bach responded by playing the piece again. If words could have captured and imparted the experience of his music, Bach could have written a few words about his favorite ideas and been done with it. Fortunately for the rest of us, he had to do more."