Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute
American drama school
The Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute (originally the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute) is an acting school founded in 1969 by the actor, director, and acting teacher Lee Strasberg. The Institute is located in Union Square on East 15th Street, also known as Lee Strasberg Way, in New York City. The school has a secondary campus in Los Angeles.
For more than 40 years, the Institute has partnered with New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where students can earn a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. The Los Angeles campus also offers an Associate of Occupational Studies degree. Until her January 2024 death, the Institute was under the artistic direction of Anna Strasberg, Lee Strasberg's widow. Students at the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute learn method acting, an acting technique created and developed by Strasberg.
History
In 1931, Lee Strasberg co-founded the Group Theatre, hailed as "America's first true theatrical collective," alongside fellow directors Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford. In 1951, he became director of the Actors Studio in New York City, considered "the nation's most prestigious acting school," and, in 1966, he was involved in the foundation of the Actors Studio West in Los Angeles.
After almost five decades of teaching private classes and shepherding generations of actors toward success at the Actors Studio, Strasberg established his own school in 1969, open to all those interested in learning The Method.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1542213. VIAF identifies the subject as 234145542798496641980. The Library of Congress control number is n2016004589. Authority coordinates are 40.735, -73.989. 4 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1969, 2024, 1931 and 1951.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.