About Stephen Schrum

Stephen A. Schrum, PhD., is Associate Professor of Theatre Arts at Pitt-Greensburg. Notable past RL (real life) productions include: Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (set in 1995) and Macbeth (performed in a cyberpunk style); Moliere’s The Miser (done in period costume) and The Misanthrope (set in the era of Disco); Sarah Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis (utilizing both the Japanese dance-drama form Butoh and hallucinatory soundscapes that Schrum created). His research area is currently “The Perception of Presence in Virtual Performance,” and he has directed virtual productions of The Bacchae and Prometheus Bound in Second Life (SL). He began teaching with technology in 1993, and since then has been writing and presenting on the topic, including editing the book, Theatre in Cyberspace: Issues of Teaching, Acting and Directing (2000). He has a chapter entitled, “Theatre in Second Life® Holds the VR Mirror Up To Nature,” in the book, Handbook of Research on Computational Arts and Creative Informatics (2009), and has another chapter, Teaching in the Virtual Theatre Classroom,” in the book, Teaching Through Multi-User Environments: Applying Dynamic Elements to the Modern Classroom (2010).