Interim Director, School of Communication, Media & Theatre Arts, Professor of Interpretation, Performance Studies and Theatre Arts
School of Communication, Media & Theatre Arts
124 Judy Sturgis Hill Building
Dr. Lee Stille has taught at Eastern Michigan University in the CMTA areas of Interpretation/ Performance Studies and Theatre Arts since 1996. A specialist in the fields of voice, speech and dialects, text analysis and performance of literature (especially Shakespeare), Dr. Stille's professional experience has closely mirrored these interests. His work includes thirty years of individualized voice/speech/dialect training with more than 200 clients (actors, performance artists, ESL students, comedians, teachers, politicians and lawyers) and consultation/coaching with over 80 theatre productions. An accomplished stage director of more than 45 productions, in 2010, Dr. Stille received EMU's prestigious Ronald W. Collins Distinguished Faculty Award for Creative Activity. His directing projects span original adaptations of drama, poetry and fiction (Shakespeare's Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, and Merchant of Venice, Cornelius Eady's Brutal Imagination, Christy Brown's Down All The Days and D.H. Lawrence's The Fox), re-interpretations of classics, (Moliere's Imaginary Invalid, Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, Macbeth, and The Tempest—for which he was awarded EMU's 2007 Artistic Recognition Award), generative works of modern and contemporary theatre (Jarry's Ubu Roi, Miller's The Crucible, Ibsen's Miss Julie, Overmyer's On The Verge, Wilson's The Piano Lesson, Kushner's Angels In America, Part II: Perestroika, and Brecht's The Threepenny Opera) and hard-hitting socio-political commentaries (The Exonerated and Branding The Bull). As an actor, Dr. Stille's work has been featured in critically recognized and award winning local productions of Equus, Jack Goes Boating, The Laramie Project, A View From The Bridge, and Dr. Seward's Dracula. His research interests center in the field of voice, speech and accent training, dramaturgy and performance of Shakespeare. He has presented at conferences for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, National Communication Association, Central States Communication Association, and Michigan Association for Speech Communication. Dr. Stille served as Director of Theatre from 2012-2023