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Tracy Bersley is a director, choreographer, and scholar whose work explores the intersection of embodiment, performance, and human connection. She currently serves as Head of Movement for the MFA Acting Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and as Resident Artist with PlayMakers Repertory Company. From 2020–2025, she served as Co-Head of the Professional Actor Training Program and producer of the Ground Floor Series, the production arm of the MFA Acting Program. Bersley’s research examines how the brain maps physical experience and how contemporary understandings of embodiment are reshaping actor training in a digital age. She is the founder and director of the Embodied Expression and Resilience Lab (EmbER Lab), where she investigates the effects of emotional experience on the nervous system and applies performance- based practices to support resilience and wellbeing in high-stress communities. As an artist, Bersley specializes in movement-based theatre and immersive performance. Through her New York City– based theatre company, DDT, she creates work that examines the actor–spectator relationship as a means of cultivating empathy, presence, and genuine human witnessing.

Before coming to UNC-Chapel Hill, Professor Bersley held faculty appointments at Yale University School of Drama, Princeton University, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (CAP 21 Musical Theatre Studio), SUNY-Purchase, and Wagner College. While earning her MFA in directing, she was awarded a graduate teaching fellowship at Syracuse University. In these institutions of higher education, she has taught a wide variety of courses in physical acting, directing, devised work, and solo performance. She has also served as choreographer at The Juilliard School and Columbia University.

In New York City, she has served as a choreographer for productions at Lincoln Center, the Public Theatre, Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Acting Company, Barrow Group, Culture Project, The Mint, Clubbed Thumb, Primary Stages, and Theatreworks USA. Regionally, she has worked on productions at McCarter Theatre in Princeton, Intiman Theatre in Seattle, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, Hamptons Shakespeare Festival, Dorset Theatre Festival in Vermont, Repertory Ensemble Theatre in Delaware, and is currently in residence at PlayMakers Repertory Company.

Bersley is an associate artist with two award-winning off-Broadway theatre companies, The Civilians and Red Bull Theatre (founding member), having her work for the latter archived in the New York Public Library Performing Arts Research Collections, including most recently, The Imaginary Invalid in 2025 and receiving a Lortel Award Nomination for Best Choreography for The Witch of Edmonton in 2011. Bersley has choreographed several new musicals for Theatreworks USA, which have toured across the country, many with off-Broadway runs at the Lucille Lortel Theater, including The Civil War, for which she was a Callaway Award finalist for Choreography in 2013. Bersley was also the resident choreographer for the College Light Opera Company in Falmouth, MA, choreographing over 30 musicals during her tenure there.

Bersley is a Drama League Fellow, an alumna of the Lincoln Center Director’s Lab, and a member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Union and the Association of Theatre Movement Educators. She holds an MFA in Directing from Syracuse University, where she studied under Robert Moss, founder of Playwrights Horizons in New York City. She has been an artist-in- residence at Second Stage Theatre and Michael Howard Studios. Bersley held a directing residency for the 1999-2000 season at McCarter Theatre, collaborating with such artists as Sam Shepard, David Mamet, and Emily Mann, and subsequently led the conservatory theatre program. Bersley also served as movement consultant for two McCarter Theatre shows that went to Broadway, Nilo Cruz’s Anna in the Tropics and Edward Albee’s All Over. She also served as the Associate Director for Speaking in Tongues at Broadway’s Roundabout Theatre.

​Tracy Bersley is dedicated to creating theatre with a deep and vigorous curiosity, intellectual rigor, and a playful but supportive spirit that she offers freely to all with whom she works. 

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