Editor’s note: Katie Spiropoulos is a former deputy news editor for the Daily. Spiropoulos was not involved in the editing or writing of this article.
“How do I take a risk? How do I do something new every single day?” graduating senior Katie Spiropoulos mused, posing questions that are on the mind of every artist — and ones that she herself has intimately wrestled with.
Spiropoulos is double majoring in international relations and theater, dance, and performance studies with a focus on acting. She is, notably, a theater tour de force at Tufts. But her stage career started long before college, back when she was eight years old.
“My parents sent me to an after-school theater camp … and I just kind of fell in love with it,” Spiropoulos said.
Growing up, she did theater in school and performed in a youth theater program run by a professional company in Oklahoma. Her first professional acting experience was playing the voice of Tiny Tim in a production of “A Christmas Carol” her senior year of high school.
Since then, Spiropoulos has been extremely involved in the Tufts theater scene, serving as president of the student-run musical theater group Torn Ticket II. She is also involved with the student-run theater group Pen, Paint, and Pretzels, or 3Ps, and has been doing shows with them since the fall of her first year.
“I really enjoy bouncing between both groups,” Spiropoulos said. “Getting to be part of both communities and help bring them together has been something that’s really important to me.”
Most recently, she acted in 3Ps’ mainstage “Tartuffe” as Elmire and Torn Ticket II’s mainstage “The Drowsy Chaperone” as the titular character. In both roles, she was a magnetic performer with a radiant singing voice and a real skill for comedic delivery that made the stage come alive.
“I have honestly been blown away by how much theater there is at Tufts and how much interest there is,” Spiropoulos said. “Torn Ticket [II] and 3Ps alone do five shows a year each, which I feel is crazy. And then we have the department on top of that.”
Among Spiropoulos’ favorites of the many productions she’s been in are “Little Women” — her first at Tufts — and “Oedipus Rex” from last semester, in which she played Jocasta.
But the performance that Spiropoulos is most proud of is that of the Tolstoy seductress Hélène in the department show “The Great Comet” — the production of which was her senior capstone.
Spiropoulos grew in confidence from the experience playing Hélène. “She’s self-identified as a slut,” Spiropoulos said. “I’d never played a character like that.”
Overall, Spiropoulos is very satisfied with the Tufts theater department, describing it as “well-rounded” and “very much a liberal arts experience.”
In particular, Spiropoulos praised the fact that theater majors are required to take technical classes on top of acting.
“I feel like the most important thing in being a theater artist is understanding how every part of a production works,” she said.
Spiropoulos has done prominent work behind the scenes. For instance, she directed Torn Ticket’s 2025 Orientation show, “Ordinary Days.”
“It was a dream of mine. It really was my baby,” she said of the production.
But Spiropoulos’ college theater education was not confined to the Medford/Somerville campus. In the fall semester of her junior year, she studied at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Theater Institute in Connecticut — an intensive and highly lauded theater program.
“It was amazing, truly the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Spiropoulos said. “It was seven days a week, 12 hours a day, just non-stop theater, which was wonderful, but also draining.”
Her time at the O’Neill made her even more ready and motivated to pursue theater professionally.
“It gave me a passion and a drive for acting and theater making … that made it possible to enjoy everything that I did at Tufts more,” she said. “It changed how I view theater in general.”
As opposed to being just a recreational extracurricular, theater became, in her own words, “my life.”
Because Spiropoulos constantly juggles productions and academic work, her schedule is jam-packed. But that’s the way she likes it.
“I am one of those people that really enjoys being busy,” she said. “So it’s never really been too much of a mental tax on me.”
Furthermore, Spiropoulos views her IR major and her theater major as being in dialogue with each other — and, in some ways, two sides of the same coin.
“I think that government and diplomacy is literally just glorified theater,” she said. “At the end of the day, when you are working in politics, it’s about understanding people … there’s so much of my theater background that helps me be able to do that because we’re all playing a role. We all have a goal.”
After graduation, Spiropoulos aims to keep acting, directing and designing — and perhaps eventually become a theater’s artistic director — though she recognizes that the professional theater landscape she is entering is complicated.
“I would be lying if I said there weren’t some bleak aspects, like anything right now,” she said.
She cited the current political attack on the arts as a potential obstacle for others to join, but also said she feels excited to join the industry and the fight against that attack.
“We’re here to stay. The arts are here to stay. You can never silence them,” she said.
Indeed, with a talent like Spiropoulos, the future of performance art looks very bright.
