Biography
David McTier is Chair and Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas, where he teaches theatre history and directing. Raised on a cattle farm in rural Georgia, he holds a Ph.D. in theatre history and criticism from the University of Texas. During the past thirty years, he has taught on the faculties of Sam Houston State University, Rockhurst University, Agnes Scott College, the University of Vermont, the University of Virginia at Wise (formerly Clinch Valley College), the University of Kentucky, and Young Harris College.
​
He has directed over 70 stage productions, including period and American classics, musicals, children’s theatre, contemporary, and original/devised plays. Of particular interest are non-traditional, mixed-media, and company-developed performance dealing with current social issues. In 2015, Dr. McTier directed the first English-language production and American premiere of the Albanian-Kosovar play, Men with Broken Hopes. He also has free-lanced as a director at Unity Theatre in Brenham, Texas, and as a production dramaturg at The Ensemble Theatre and The Classical Theatre, both located in Houston.
​
Dr. McTier has been an active participant in the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. Four of his productions have been invited to and performed at KCACTF region festivals: I of the Beholder (2001), a devised installation about mental illness and creativity; LOST (2004), a devised performance about the effects of war on women; Machinal (2015), for which he received a national award from the Kennedy Center as “Distinguished Director of a Play”; and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which garnered another national directing award. In 2004, he received a faculty fellowship from the Kennedy Center to attend the National Critics Institute at the O’Neill Theater Center, and he returned to the O’Neill in 2010 for the National Puppetry Conference. In 2013, he was awarded the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s (ATHE) “Innovation in Teaching Prize” for Region 6.
​
In 2016, McTier participated in the Dramaturgy Intensive at the MFA Playwrights’ Workshop at the Kennedy Center.
Named to Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers, he spent 18 summers teaching gifted and talented high school students at the governors’ programs in Georgia (Governor’s Honors Program), Virginia (Governor’s School for the Visual and Performing Arts), and Missouri (Missouri Fine Arts Academy). Dr. McTier also taught high school for one year and continues to hold Texas teacher certification in theatre arts for grades 6-12.
​
Keenly interested in different lands and cultures, Dr. McTier has traveled throughout the U.S. and to 61 countries. He was a 2012 Fulbright Scholar to Kosovo, where he taught at the University of Prishtina and directed Njerëz Me Shresa Të Thyera (“Men with Broken Hopes”) at the National Theatre. Upon returning, he served a three-year appointment on the Fulbright National Review Committee for the Balkans. In 2016, he received an NEH grant to attend the Summer Institute “American Muslims: History, Culture and Politics” in DC. He recently finished a year abroad as a Fulbright Scholar to Romania with assignments at the University of Bucharest and UNATC in Bucharest (Fall 2016) and Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj (Spring 2017).
​
Education
Ph.D., Theatre History and Criticism, University of Texas, 1995
Thesis: A Crisis In Criticism: A Defense Of Two “Postmodern” Productions, Oscar Brockett, Supervisor
M.A., Theatre, Indiana University, 1984
Thesis: The Emergence Of London’s Illegitimate Theatres during the Early Eighteenth Century, Leigh Woods, Supervisor
A.B., Drama, Honors Program, University of Georgia, 1981
Thesis: Drama Certification and Georgia’s Solution: The Drama Specialist, Faye Head, Supervisor