University and Community
photo by Mike Simses
University
Larissa is an associate professor at New Mexico State University, where she has been on the faculty since the fall of 2013. She has the joy of working with an enthusiastic student body, who bring diverse interests, experiences, and backgrounds to their classrooms and collaborations. She is a member of the National Alliance of Acting Teachers.
The courses she teaches include:
Directing and Devising
THTR 395: Directing I
THTR 414: Collaborative Theatre-Making
Acting
THTR 310 M01: Styles in Acting
THTR 312: Acting Shakespeare
CMI 314 M30: Acting for Film
THTR 110: Beginning Acting
THTR 105: Acting for Non-Majors
Other
THTR 360: Creative Drama
THTR 430 M03: Special Topics: Script Analysis
She has also guided students in several independent study courses, including:
“A Director’s Voice in the Study of Gender”
“Special Topics in Devising”
“History and Practice of Devised Theatre”
and “Advanced Creative Drama”
New Plays at NMSU
She is a co-chair of the High Desert Play Development Workshop, through which professional playwrights are invited to workshop a play with students and members of the NMSU community. The workshops culminate in public readings, and the department aims to produce one of the High Desert plays every other year as a part of the mainstage season.
photo by Mike Wise
Community
In conjunction with each of the productions at NMSU, Larissa organizes post-show conversations for audiences, with guest experts on topics related to the play, as well as conversations with the casts and creative teams.
Larissa began teaching as a teaching artist, working in schools, temporary housing facilities, and with community groups across the country from San Diego to Chicago, Evanston, Princeton, and throughout upstate New York, and four of the five boroughs of New York City.
In Las Cruces, she works with the Beloved Community, an organization for adolescents with developmental disabilities, to facilitate bi-monthly drama workshops for adults and adolescents of all abilities.
With the help of university student-teachers, she also regularly leads after-school drama classes for local 1st-3rd and 4th-6th graders.
For more information on the community programs in Las Cruces, High Desert Play Development Workshops, or the Department of Theatre Arts at New Mexico State University, feel free to reach out to Larissa at llury@nmsu.edu.