“I feel incredibly lucky and supportive. It’s a dream job. It’s a place that allows me to continue to spread my wings producing, directing, acting, and writing while also having a family and being with my kids. When you’re a struggling young actor you think all of things weren’t meant for you.” — Aaron Muñoz
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Aaron Muñoz is a man of many things.
He is an actor and an educator, a husband, and a father. He is a friend, a son, a self-proclaimed Midwest guy from Kansas City, Missouri, and a big Kansas City Chiefs fan.
Muñoz is also an artist, a storyteller, a producer, a playwright, and a two-time BRIDGE Award Grant recipient, which is the very reason this story is being told.
And after seeing his warm-hearted, kind-natured, people-minded, instinctive response to someone who needed just a little help inside Café Kopi on a chilly February day, it became clear that one more thing could be added to that list of many things— Aaron Muñoz is a wonderful human being.
Enter Aaron Muñoz
Muñoz is an assistant professor of acting for the Department of Theatre in the College of Fine & Applied Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (Illinois), a role he has held since spring of 2019.
He also taught previously at Middle Tennessee State University, Lipscomb University, Oglethorpe University, Point Park University, Tennessee State University, Florida Atlantic University, Georgia Highlands College, and Huntington College.
Before falling into the role of an acting teacher though, Muñoz did it all.
He acted in plays, movies and TV shows like the Walking Dead and Stranger Things; he back-packed across Italy; he reconnected with his family roots and ancestry in Chile; he lived in two of the biggest cities in the country (Chicago and New York); and he started grass roots, creative story-telling projects in a place that truly needed theatre at that time (Nashville).
Enter Chicago and Nashville
Muñoz said he was bitten by the acting bug, fell in love with the craft, and learned how to be an actor while attending college at Columbia University in Chicago.
“I went to Chicago to become the next Chris Farley. I wanted to do the Second City stuff and do improv and I did. I did all of that,” Muñoz said. “I really just wanted to be the best actor I could be.”
Muñoz graduated from Columbia then received his MFA from Alabama Shakespeare Festival’s professional actor training program.
While he was learning how to do Shakespeare, Muñoz ended up doing the most Shakespeare thing anyone can do— he fell in love.
“When I was in grad school there was a local liberal arts school and our grad school show was the Grapes of Wrath,” Muñoz said. “We needed a couple more roles to fill out the cast and Liz (his wife) auditioned and got in the play. It was very much like we did a play together and then fell in love.”
Muñoz said from there he got married, moved to the Big Apple, and lived the life of a freelance actor doing plays all over the country, while also getting the occasional movie and show gig.
When the New York scene ended, Muñoz and his wife packed their bags and moved to Nashville where he saw himself transitioning into his next roles as a father, a storyteller, a producer, a creator, and a coach.
“I started combining the things I did as an actor and broadened that to be able to touch more things,” Muñoz said. “I was getting involved in the origin of stories and projects and helping other artists to do what they wanted…like a coach.”
Muñoz said he was spreading his wings as an artist, expanding his skills in diverse ways, and while he was in Nashville he noticed there was this void in the theatre scene, and realized he could help.
Cue the Nashville Story Garden, a company Muñoz founded to be an incubator for original projects that creates film, theatre, and modern media from the ground up.
In his role as the founding artistic director, Muñoz helped create award winning projects and podcasts such as a literacy project with Nashville Parks and the public library called Once Upon a Time, all the while he was still acting and performing.
“As we had our second daughter, (I realized) the life of an actor, going out of town for two months to do a play, going for a month at a time to do a film, was not something I really wanted to do long term,” he said. “So, I decided to look into higher education.”
Enter the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Muñoz said he had always been a teaching artist, but applying to Illinois was a big, intentional push to get into the higher education space and find his artistic home base.
“I found a great fit here at the University of Illinois,” he said. “I found a theatre department that was vibrant, had a wonderful reputation, and supported my work as an artist in addition to supporting my work as a young educator.”
Muñoz said being at Illinois is a rewarding experience because he can coach young artists by providing a nurturing and supportive environment and teaching them how to avoid making the mistakes he made or mimicking the things he found successful.
“That’s what I really love about being here and being in the theatre department,” Muñoz said. “I feel incredibly lucky and supportive. It’s a dream job. It’s a place that allows me to continue to spread my wings producing, directing, acting, and writing while also having a family and being with my kids. When you’re a struggling young actor you think all of things weren’t meant for you.”
Enter the BRIDGE Seed Fund Grants
Muñoz and his colleague John Boesche, associate professor of media design in the Department of Theatre at Illinois, applied for an initiation grant through the Birmingham-Illinois Partnership for Discovery, Engagement, and Education (BRIDGE) Seed Fund and were awarded the grant during the 2022-2023 academic year.
The BRIDGE Seed Fund is a product of the now decade-long BRIDGE partnership between Illinois and the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom.
In the original BRIDGE agreement both universities committed to an annual seed fund that was launched at the same time as the partnership in 2014. The seed fund is supported by $100K in funding annually from both institutions, and that money is broken up into grants that are distributed to full-time faculty who apply.
The initiation grant Muñoz received in 2022 supported his student-centered research project, which was titled, The Universal Stage: Experiments in Hybrid Performance for the 21st Century Theatre.
That project focused on answering a very modern question— how does the film-making aesthetic meld with live theatre performance to deliver the same rich experience to an audience in person and at home?
In other words, Muñoz, Boesche, and other collaborators, worked with the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute to look for methodologies that would make theatre hybrid.
Muñoz said he and Boesche looked to sports to answer their questions.
“Think about it, 25 to 30 years ago when someone was viewing a soccer match or baseball game or basketball or football at home it wasn’t a very good viewing experience so going to the stadium live was always better,” Muñoz said. “Now (in the current day and age), you can argue that the home experience is sometimes better than the live experience, in other words people are getting the same story of this game being played live, a game that has a lot of drama, at home and they are getting the same great experience as those watching it live."
Muñoz said that's why they looked to sports as a model because they wanted to find out how people can watch a live play and still get a rich, entertaining experience at home like with sports.
So, they started their research by investigating how to use more media savvy, film-making techniques to record a live act because Muñoz said this would create the same vibrant, entertaining, memorable viewing experience for all audiences at-home.
Muñoz said their work started soon after they received the grant. After all, they had one year to use the money and establish connections, particularly at the University of Birmingham and the renowned Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Muñoz said since this was an initiation grant, their main goal was to establish collaboration and during the course of the year said they worked closely with Prof. Jessica Chiba, an Assistant Professor at the Shakespeare Institute; Prof. Abigail Rokison-Woodall, a senior lecturer in Shakespeare and Theatre Deputy Director of Institute: Education at the Shakespeare Institute; Prof. Erin Sullivan, reader in Shakespeare at the Shakespeare Institute; and Prof. Michael Dobson, the director of the Shakespeare Institute.
Once those connections were made, their work soared. Muñoz and Boesche traveled to England in the Fall of 2022 where they worked with the Shakespeare Institute and created a workshop with their master’s students. The workshop included interpreting and performing historical Shakespeare performances from different points of view.
They also hosted Chiba at Illinois and the following semester Muñoz said they invited Rokison-Woodall to lead a virtual workshop with the junior Shakespeare acting class. The workshop was on the connection between Shakespeare and Jacques Lecoq, who was a physical theatre artist.
“We were putting (what we wrote in the grant) to practice and experimenting with this idea of hyper-performance asking themselves how live and digital performances exist at the same time,” Muñoz said. “What we’re working toward, and this is the long lens, is a co-production of a Shakespeare play that happens at Stratford-upon-Avon and Champaign-Urbana. Audiences will be able to see the scenes locally and digitally (a hybrid theatre experience).”
In April 2024, Muñoz was selected to receive his second BRIDGE grant.
The new grant Muñoz received for this upcoming academic year will allow him and Boesche to continue their work from the 2022-23 initiation grant.
End Scene
Muñoz said overall he is thankful he received the first BRIDGE Seed Fund Grant because it allowed him to spread his wings and connect with other people with different points of views and who experience diverse ways of life.
He also said he was grateful to be able to travel and connect with a diverse international group of students and collaborate with colleagues who brought their own strong skillsets to the table.
As the almost two-hour interview neared a close, Muñoz was asked one of the last questions on the list, which was, “If you went back to freshmen year at Columbia, would you believe all the work you’ve done?”
Muñoz fell silent, holding his coffee cup, and slightly nodding his head.
“You know,” he began, “I think I would. I think I would believe it, but I would be very amazed.”
Muñoz went on to explain that if he were to go back to freshmen year of college knowing what he knows now, knowing that he had a career, a wife, a family, and a life that he loves, knowing that one day he will be able to do everything he wanted to, he would be in awe.
He said he would be happy.
“You have all these hopes and dreams when you’re that age and seeing them come true, knowing that they’ll come true is just,” he paused, looked up smiling and said, “you know it’s just, wow.”
Analicia Haynes is the storyteller and social media specialist for Illinois International. She can be reached at ahayn2@illinois.edu.
