Facilities

The Eisner Center houses state-of-the-art stages and rehearsal spaces, numerous classrooms and offices, as well as many open spaces especially configured to encourage interdisciplinary activity. The Eisner Center now encompasses Burke Hall to create a continuous performing arts experience. Taken together, Denison offers its performing arts students, faculty and programs more than 108,000 square feet of transformational space.

The Eisner Center is a performing arts ecosystem where students learn alongside seasoned production professionals in state-of-the-art facilities.

At Denison, you benefit not only from distinguished faculty but also from hands-on mentorship with expert technical theatre practitioners — including technical directors, production managers, scenic and lighting designers, and costume shop specialists. This direct access to working professionals sets Denison apart.

Through directed studies, assistantships, and immersive lab experiences in Eisner’s fully equipped scene shop (for both wood and metal fabrication), extensive costume shop, and cutting-edge lighting and audio systems, you’ll gain practical skills, artistic confidence, and the collaborative mindset essential for a career in theatre production.

You won’t just study the craft — you’ll practice it, refine it, and master it. You’ll build scenery, construct costumes, hang lights, run crews, and help bring performances to life. And because we believe in learning by doing, we pay you as you build experience, skill, and muscle memory.

Along the way, you’ll learn visual storytelling, develop a body of work, and build a portfolio of stagecraft skills, including:

• Sewing and costume construction, with an understanding of the wardrobe crew’s vital role.
• Lighting and audio technology, including live-mixing rehearsals and performances under professional guidance.
• Carpentry, rigging, props work, and scenic painting, taught with industry-standard safety practices.
• Leadership, communication, scheduling, and problem-solving — the core competencies of successful production management

At Eisner, you don’t just learn theatre. You become a theatre professional.

The Sharon Martin Hall is a flexible, state-of-the-art 400-seat proscenium theatre built with the ability to accommodate a wide variety of performances. Multiple stage and seating configurations allow for an array of stagings and audience sizes. Acoustics can be adjusted to deaden the space for amplified sound — or liven it for acoustic and orchestral performances.

The 3,600-square-foot Hylbert Family Studio Theatre (formerly the Black Box Theatre) seats an intimate audience of up to 150.

Rehearsal Spaces

Special rehearsal spaces can be used for performances and classes as well:

• The Large Rehearsal Space can seat up to 156 people. It is exactly the same size as the Martin Hall stage, which allows rehearsals to be at the same scale as performances. The slightly scaled-back rigging, lighting and AV systems are similar to the Martin Theatre, and the Large Rehearsal Space also can be used for performances, classes, and the occasional meeting.
• The Medium Rehearsal Space is the prototypical versatile space, equipped for teaching, choral rehearsals, and theater lab work.

Additional Resources

The Eisner Center also contains excellent construction and support facilities:

• A fully-equipped scene shop for both wood and metal fabrication
• An extensive costume shop with a separate cutting and pattern layout area
• The Mulberry Inter-media eXperimental (MIX) lab contains digital drawing, scanning, photo editing and film editing software and hardware, used in costume, scenic, and lighting design courses. A satellite lab space holds ten computer stations equipped with the same capabilities as the Mulberry Lab.
• Extensive storage facilities that house many hundreds of props and costumes from every historical period
• A theatre library, with hundreds of play scripts and theatre texts.