Both UCI and the city of Irvine were founded in 1965, on a former buffalo ranch in Southern Orange County, California. The campus is four miles from the Pacific and approximately half way between Los Angeles and San Diego.

Although the city of Irvine remains largely park-like and suburban, it centers a fast-growing county of more than two million people, high-tech industries, world-renowned theme parks and magnificent beaches. Increasingly, it is becoming a cultural center as well. Two outstanding professional theatre companies are close at hand: the Tony Award-winning South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, only ten minutes from campus, and the Laguna Playhouse in the nearby art colony of Laguna Beach. And superbly equipped touring houses both on the campus (the Barclay Theatre) and in Costa Mesa (Orange County Performing Arts Center) present world theatre (Robert LaPage’s Far Side of the Moon, the Beijing Opera Company of Shanghai), national Broadway tours, and world-class symphony and opera.

And of course UCI is less than an hour from Los Angeles/Hollywood, the film and television capital of the world and the site of more stage productions than any other city in the U.S. (yes, including New York). With additional options of skiing in winter and year-round ocean surfing and sailing - virtually within sight of each other – Irvine is a place where you can study hard, but have lots to do when you find yourself between assignments.

A variety of housing opportunities awaits UCI students, about half of whom reside in campus housing (dormitories, apartments, and theme houses), and half in apartments or houses in the nearby communities of Newport Beach, Laguna Beach, Tustin and Costa Mesa.

The Claire Trevor School of the Arts

Drama at UCI is one of the four departments comprising the Claire Trevor School of the Arts, which provides students with extensive opportunities to work in collaboration with students and faculty in the School’s closely-related programs - Dance, Music and Studio Art. Within the school, therefore, cross-disciplinary creative opportunities - such as video art, multi-media performance, opera, dance theatre and performance art - continually flourish. Nor are interdisciplinary connections limited to within our School – Drama shares faculty appointments with both the programs of Infomatics (in Computer Sciences) and African American Studies (in Humanities), and enjoys fruitful relations with a great many departments and programs across the campus, including English, History, Comparative Literature, Political Science, Asian American studies, East Asian Languages and Literatures, Critical Theory, Spanish and Portuguese, German and Russian, and French and Italian. And Drama’s PhD studies are conducted as part of a comprehensive joint program – the first such in the nation - with our sister campus, UC San Diego.

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