Tony Award-winning director Joe Mantello is donating $1 million to the School of Drama at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.
The gift, which is the largest alumni gift on record for UNCSA’s School of Drama, will go toward a full-ride scholarship for top students as well as a fund dedicated to student-driven productions.
The Joe Mantello Endowed Scholarship in Drama will support one recipient at a time through four years of undergraduate study at UNCSA. The inaugural scholarship will be awarded to a student enrolled in fall 2025.
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The Joe Mantello Creative Catalyst Endowed Fund for Drama will support original productions from students and augment existing programs on campus such as Keys to the Kingdom, which is a season in the fourth year that is programmed, produced, directed, acted and often written or devised by students.
Mantello graduated from UNCSA in 1984 and went on to star in several theatrical productions, including as Louis Ironson in the original Broadway cast of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Perestroika and Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and in the 2011 revival of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, as well as the 2014 HBO adaptation.
As a director, Mantello won Tony Awards for his direction of Take Me Out and Assassins. He is well-known as the director of the Broadway production of Wicked, which opened in 2003 and is still running.
“We are profoundly grateful to Joe for this gift,” said UNCSA Chancellor Brian Cole. “His career has been a case study in creative excellence, multifaceted talent and visionary perspective. This gift will help the School of Drama attract the most talented prospective students, befitting of the program’s top-tier worldwide reputation, and build on its remarkable tradition of artistic rigor and industry relevance.”
“Joe has been at the forefront of the industry for decades, and knows better than anyone how much the world of professional theater has evolved and continues to evolve,” said UNCSA Dean of Drama John Langs. “By investing in our students’ ability to create and produce original, independent work that augments and complements our existing drama curriculum, Joe is helping to prepare actors to take charge of their careers in this evolving industry, training generations of actors and directors to explore the human condition and create work that reaches new audiences, just as he has done throughout his extraordinary career.”
