Playwrights Horizons Theater School

Playwrights Horizons Theater School is a "professional training program for theater artists: actors, directors, playwrights, and dramaturgs" [http://www.phtschool.org/mission.html] affiliated with NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. It is located at 440 Lafayette Street in Manhattan.

The school was founded in the mid-1980s when NYU, in an effort to expand its program to also train directors, stage managers, and playwrights, approached then-head of Playwrights Horizons Andre Bishop to start a school that would fill those functions. An acting program was included in the school out of necessity: it is impossible to train directors or managers without actors.

The school is the only one of the many studios in Tisch, aside from the Technical Production Track, that does not exclusively train actors. Students may train along many tracks, including acting, directing, design, and Creating Original Work (COW).

PHTS puts up a huge volume of student productions every year, often with multiple shows running concurrently in the same space and breaks between different productions rare.

The school is currently run by Helen Cook. Notable faculty include Michael Krass, Theresa McCarthy, Elizabeth Hess, Maggie Low, and Ruben Polendo.