Dr. Jennie Pardoe is a teacher-artist who helps acting students develop both technical excellence and the inner resources to sustain a life in the theatre. Her teaching emphasizes rigor in craft, truthful connection, collaboration, reflection, and professional habits. She is especially interested in helping students become disciplined, generous actors who can contribute meaningfully to both the profession and their communities.
She got her start in elementary school when she was reluctant to go home and clean her bedroom, so she auditioned for the school play instead. She was cast in the leading role of “Mother Nature” in that 5th grade show, and hasn’t looked back since.
After growing up in educational theatre, she attended Brigham Young University to get her BFA in Acting. She spent a year after graduation working as a legal advocate for disabled people and then decided to attend graduate school at Emerson College in Theatre Education. She graduated with her master’s degree while working full time in college admissions at Boston Architectural College.
During her studies, she recognized that while there were many anecdotes of the positive impacts of acting on performers, there was very little research to back those claims up. She decided to engage in that research and joined the doctoral program at the University of Missouri. While in school, she was very active as an actor and director. She became an associate director for the Center for Applied Theatre and Drama Research and taught elementary school drama students.
In 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, she joined the performance faculty at Brigham Young University-Idaho. Directing eight shows in six years for the department and earning tenure after her first three years kept her busy, but she finally finished her dissertation research and became Dr. Pardoe. In 2024, she also gave a campus-wide devotional speaking to over 9,000 people attending in person, in addition to those who listen via internet or radio. Her speech was called “Righteous Failure”. She currently serves as the program lead for the undergraduate theatre program at BYU-I.