donald rizzo

I currently serve as a Teaching Associate/Teacher of Record at CSULA.  In Fall 2025, I was the sole instructor for a class of 20 undergraduate students, for Acting I (TA 1410). I created and implemented a 16 week syllabus for a class that met twice a week, for two and half hours, per class. I was entirely responsible for setting the curriculum, evaluating, and assessing students' work. I lectured, led activities, and assigned scenes and monologues, which introduced students to the fundamental ideas of acting, providing opportunities for them to explore the process of acting, from memorization and script analysis to rehearsal and staging, through performance. I facilitated the class by coaching, teaching, and directing students. An emphasis was placed on objectives, actions, tactics, obstacles, and stakes, in an effort to play moment-to-moment and to live believably, under the imaginary circumstances of the script. We explored acting techniques based on the Stanislavski System, including Uta Hagen, Sanford Meisner, Earle Gister, and Practical Aesthetics (developed by David Mamet and William H. Macy). We also explored physical and psychological senses, as well as endowing objects. The course also offered a brief introduction to short-form improvisation and to on-camera acting. Throughout the semester we engaged in improvisational activities and theatre games, which helped to facilitate ensemble work, and experience the core concepts of what it means to work collaboratively. 

I spent my formative years immersed in theater.  When I was in high school, I spent four years in the Student Television Arts Company (STAC), an arts ensemble, which took up a third of my school day, where I collaborated with the top visual and performing artists in our district.  I went on to graduate from the Atlantic Theater Company’s two-year acting conservatory in New York City.  I have also studied character-based improv and sketch comedy at the Groundlings in Los Angeles, completing their core track improv training program. As a teaching artist, I have developed and taught lesson plans to high school theater students at my alma mater, Herricks High School and at Grand Arts School of Visual and Performing Arts in downtown Los Angeles.  I also created, led, and facilitated an afterschool improv program for fourteen students at Grand Arts, which culminated in a live performance.  I am a proud graduate of UCLA, where I received my BA in American Literature & Culture, along with a minor in Visual and Performing Arts Education (VAPAE). As part of UCLA’s VAPAE program, I completed the Arts Education Training Sequence (AETS).  I am currently a Candidate for the MFA in Television, Film, and Theatre: Acting, at California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA), expected to graduate in Spring 2027.