NEW HAVEN, CONN.: James Bundy, who has led David Geffen School of Drama at Yale (DGSD) for nearly a quarter century, plans to retire as dean in June 2026, Yale’s top leaders announced today. He will also step down as artistic director of Yale Repertory Theatre but will continue to teach.
“James’s long service to DGSD is unprecedented—no prior dean of the school has held the role as long,” wrote president Maurie McInnis and provost Scott Strobel in a joint message to the university community. “His tenure is marked by outstanding achievements as an artist, administrator, teacher, and fundraiser. In addition, his visionary leadership has fostered extraordinary advancements in graduate conservatory theater education and professional practice, fundamentally transforming DGSD and Yale Rep and positioning both institutions for ongoing preeminence.”
A Yale alumnus who was first named dean in 2002, Bundy successfully attracted philanthropic support for the dramatic arts at Yale, playing a lead role in establishing 70 of the school’s 91 named scholarships, and most significantly securing $150 million from the David Geffen Foundation in 2021. The largest single gift in the history of the American theatre, it both eliminated tuition for all degree and certificate students in perpetuity and led to the renaming of the school from Yale School of Drama to the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale.
As dean, Bundy is credited with transforming the school’s leadership structure, recruiting a team with diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences, appointing all 10 chairs of the school’s programs of study, and cultivating its board of advisors.
Bundy also led the school through the Covid-19 pandemic, when health precautions effectively halted live theatre. In response, the school temporarily lengthened its three-year MFA program, fully subsidizing a fourth year to provide students with “meaningful production assignments, a core tenet of the school’s conservatory training,” McInnis and Strobel wrote.
Meanwhile, at Yale Rep, Bundy produced four world-premiere plays that advanced to Broadway and collectively received a total of 11 Tony nominations and two Tony Awards; two other plays were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. He also helped establish Yale’s Binger Center for New Theatre, which develops and underwrites new plays. Ten of the play and musicals produced under his tenure were honored with the Outstanding Production of the Year Award by the Connecticut Critics Circle, which has also recognized Bundy himself with the Tom Killen Award for lifetime dedication to the theatre and Connecticut theatre, as well as the Outstanding Direction Award for his staging of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
With other university leaders, Bundy has to date raised more than $100 million toward a new Dramatic Arts Building, intended as the home of DGSD, Yale Rep, and the undergraduate program in theatre, dance, and performance studies. It will also include dedicated rehearsal space for the Yale Dramatic Association.
“Working in this community has been a sustaining source of joy since my first day as a student here in the fall of 1992,” Bundy said in a YaleNews report. “My three years of training at Yale completely changed the course of my life. On top of that, I’ve been fortunate to have my dream job right here for nearly 23 years. I feel a near-overwhelming sense of gratitude to all of the students, interns, faculty, staff, alumni, friends, members of the board of advisors, guest artists and artisans, donors, audience members, critics and reporters, university colleagues, and professional colleagues, in Connecticut, across the United States, and internationally, who have enriched my life over many years.”
The provost’s office will form a search advisory committee this spring to help identify Bundy’s successor.
