About Us

Lots of people want more out of life. We’re an improv school that trains and inspires people so they build the confidence they need to evolve.

We do this through our improv classes, corporate trainings, development courses, and shows.

Our school is founded on the conviction that IMPROV IS FOR EVERYONE. And the benefits extend from the stage to your business and to living a fulfilling life. We have evolved improvisation over the last 20 years to help YOU evolve!

OUR PHILOSOPHY

At Improvolution, we know that you want to be fulfilled, inspired and energized.
We know from our 20+ year experience that improv can help you reach your full potential - in your career and life, even if that simply means adding more fun and laughter to it.
Like so many people, you know there’s more to life than you’re experiencing right now, which makes you feel unsatisfied, disappointed, unmotivated, and maybe even bored. We believe you ought to learn and use improv skills to have a more impactful, vibrant life.
Improv is more than “just” an entertaining performance style. It is a game changer. That’s why we shout from the mountain tops (or wherever we get the chance to shout) that IMPROV IS FOR EVERYONE!

FEMALE-FOUNDED, OWNED & RUN

Our school was female-founded, is female-owned and run. We are proud to have been the first and only school in NYC that can say that, too! (and it’s likely we can say it about the entire country!)
As improvisers, teachers and corporate educators, Holly, Rebecca Sarah, and Mallory are dedicated to creating an environment that supports and fosters everyone — from all backgrounds, experiences and cultures.
Improv is a TEAM SPORT. Pure and simple. Which means, everyone is vital to the process. And everyone’s uniqueness just makes the whole thing more interesting and dynamic. There’s no ‘ONE WAY/RIGHT WAY’ to improvise. Our goal, as owners and leaders, is to empower and inspire everyone in our company to bring their FULL self into a culture of YES, AND.
We hope that everyone who comes to us, for however long they stay, grows and expands who they are, knowing we all have their backs.

IMPROVOLUTION! was founded by Los Angeles GROUNDLINGS alumna HOLLY MANDEL in January 2002 when she moved to New York after deciding to leave LA. As a GROUNDLING she performed, wrote, directed and taught as a Main Company member for over six years. She proudly created the longest-running long-form show in LA before leaving, “The Crazy Uncle Joe Show” which you can see any Wednesday night. She also studied with the wonderful SECOND CITY director Jeff Michalski and the fantastic Stan Wells of THE EMPTY STAGE. She’s appeared on TV, film and countless commercials (2 of them award-winning in fact!) - all of them using a little or a LOT of improv. She was also on the rotating sub team of improvisers for WHOSE LINE IS IT ANYWAY? (for the ONE ‘girl’ slot.)
Holly occasionally guest teaches and performs at THE GROUNDLINGS in Los Angeles. She has directed the Main Company shows and performed with Drew Droege in an improvised show they created, “WigProv”. She started THE LOWBAR in LA from 2015-2017. She is currently working to launching a version of IMPROVOLUTION in LA.
She teaches Improvisation and Sketch at PACE UNIVERSITY in NYC, creating the BFA Comedy Studies program there. She has taught at USC and UCLA, and has traveled to London, Bristol, Sydney and Melbourne to teach as well.
She has created talks and programs based on her work with women and girls on perfectionism, the limits of obeying cultural ‘shoulds’, and liberating one’s self for the sake of all women, called GOOD GIRLS AREN’T FUNNY.
All her work can be found on hollymandel.com.
Rebecca Stuard brings over 25 years of improvisation experience to Improvolution, joining as the Creative Director and co-owner in 2014 and elevating to Executive Director in 2020.
In her first career she spent 9 years touring Europe and the US in musicals.
She was a quadruple threat. Actor/Singer/Dancer/Musician.
Her favorite role was Helga in Sam Mendes'/Rob Marshall's Cabaret. She was the tenor sax player In the orchestra.
On top of her wide range of performing and teaching experience, she has been a Lead Facilitator for manager module training programs: corporate leadership, team building and effective brainstorming for her clients which include Bank of America, GE, Citi Bank, Amex, Toyota, Bloomberg Deloitte, NBA.
She also has a yearly assignment with Yale School of Management and Yale Law School.
She teaches all levels of Improv at Improvolution. (Level 1 is her favorite) and is often performing in shows at Improvolution
She is also an adjunct professor in the Theater Department at Pace University.
And finally she has been performing as a background player and rehearsal actor(stand-in) on Saturday Night Live for 19 years and counting.
"I love to laugh! That’s why I do what I do!"
Sarah joined team Improvolution in 2012. The original plan was to just take a few improv classes to spice up her audition skills as a musical theater performer, but those plans delightfully pivoted into a 10 year (and counting!) passion and career with improv.
As a Corporate Trainer and Director of Corporate Education, Sarah has designed programs for and facilitated workshops for clients such as Capital One, Louis Vuitton, Genentech, Spotify, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Yale University, Parade Magazine and many more. Her favorite part of bringing improv into the office is watching the shift that happens from the beginning of the session to the end. Colleagues go from, “ugh, I don’t want to do another dumb team building workshop…to holy $h*t, this was AWESOME!” She attributes the transformation to what she’s dubbed the ‘kale inside the brownie’ approach; improv teaches the tools you need to kick a$$ at work (kale) AND is super fun (brownie) at the same time!
Sarah is also no stranger to the stage...the BIG stage in fact. After graduating from the prestigious dance program at Point Park University, Sarah toured the world with favorite performances including The Music Man starring Jeff Goldblum, and the 2008 Broadway revival of Gypsy starring Patti LuPone, Sondheim: The Birthday Concert at New York City’s Lincoln Center, and helping to raise millions of dollars for Broadway Cares Equity fights AIDS while doing the running man alongside Matthew Morrison (Glee’s Mr. Shuester) in Broadway Bares. Her sense of comedic timing and witty choreography have been called upon for NBC’s SMASH, immersive shows at the beautiful Unico resort in Riviera Maya, as well as her award winning work with children’s theater as a faculty member at Broadway Training Center in Westchester, NY.
As a professional Freelance Creative (i.e., actor, improviser, musician, director & producer), Improvolution became a natural home for Mallory upon starting as a student back in January 2014.
With a long history of performing, creating, and coordinating, Mallory had the pleasure of producing and performing in the "Smart and Lovely Show" at The Triple Crown Underground (2017-2020) and Improvolution shows (2018-2022), and now has the honor of supporting the Improvolution community as the Education Managing Director.
Although she looks back fondly on the years spent hustling and performing in Off-Broadway/Off-Off Broadway shows (The Adding Machine, She Has a Name, Deathbed, Hopeless/Irresistible; Cineplay Award Winner for Best Actress, Strawberry One Act Festival Best Actress Nominee), feature/short films (Slate Yourself, In Transit, Christmas Dinner, Possessed by Love, Saving Rigby, Heaven and Earth), and a handful of commercials, Mallory can be found nowadays on stage making up songs in the extraordinary, award-winning Improvised Musical Comedy "Broadway's Next Hit Musical." She's also a Teaching Artist all around NYC and Westchester (Improvolution, The Museum of the City of New York, CASA Program, Broadway Training Center, CC & Mallory).
Mallory enjoys producing media with her friends and letting her inner goblins shine on stage. @yesandmallory

OUR INFLUENCES

We aspire to carry on many of the ideas and the heart of Neva Boyd and Viola Spolin’s work — “the mothers of improvisation”.
Like any art form, everyone who dedicates themselves to it changes it, develops it and helps it evolve and diversify.
However, we are aware of the two women who birthed the spirit and intention behind what we currently refer to as “improv”. They were sociologists, teachers and change-makers along with being artists. They were committed to equality, access to education, allowing people to express themselves freely, and inspiring everyone to let the best parts of themselves out to co-create with others for the betterment of the whole.
If you’re an “improv-nerd-in-the-making’ we encourage you to learn more about these remarkable innovators and geniuses!
As you have probably read by now, our school is in the lineage of THE GROUNDLINGS in Los Angeles. Our founder, Holly Mandel, as well as a handful of our teachers, were trained there.
GROUNDLINGS added to this new style of spontaneous performance with its emphasis on the CHARACTER — the people IN the scene, not the format or the twists and turns of plot.
It began around the same time as Chicago’s SECOND CITY in fact.
In 1972, Gary Austin (a veteran of San Francisco’s “The Committee”) assembled a group of performers in Los Angeles who just wanted to work on their craft. Together they would improvise, perform monologues, scenes, characters, songs, dances, classic plays, you name it. After about a year, they started doing performances and inviting friends to come and watch.
In January of 1974, Gary Austin announced that he wanted to create a theatre company. Taking its name from the group of lower class audience members who stood on the ground in front of the stage to watch plays in Shakespeare’s day, “The Groundlings” was officially incorporated as a non-profit organization. There were about fifty founding members who would develop material in workshops and then perform the best work in the weekend shows. The first show as “The Groundlings” was in the 30-seat basement of the Oxford Theatre (now The Met) near the corner of Santa Monica Blvd and Western Ave. Esteemed LA Times theatre critic, Sylvie Drake, was in the audience that first weekend and wrote a rave review saying “This could be the start of something big,”.
She was right. Since then, The Groundlings as an institution has had an enormous impact on comedy and culture, with performers, writers, creators and directors coming out of the school: original and current cast members of SNL, Oscar-winning films, Emmy-winning actors and writers. To read more, visit their website, it’s impressive!
www.Groundlings.com
We teach improvisation with a character lens. This is because Holly began her improv career at the GROUNDLINGS THEATER SCHOOL in Los Angeles and so her approach is influenced by this unique style. Holly has also incorporated much of what she has gleaned from various teachers from Los Angeles and New York, as well as inspiration from worlds ranging from clowning to collective cultural developmental theory.
We don’t teach “a format” like other schools do – our preference is the basics of improvisation first, format later. We also emphasize that improv is a team sport and foster that spirit in every class, as it’s paramount to improv itself. It’s never about being the funniest, fastest or most clever. “Improv is for everyone” isn’t just a nice idea, it’s the philosophy that runs the school.
Underneath it all, Holly, Rebecca, Sarah and all the instructors at Improvolution feel and try to convey the deeper lessons that improv has taught them…what saying “yes, and” really means, how to truly listen, to embrace the unknown not fear it, and that positivity and inclusion always wins.

OUR COMMITMENT

1. Creating a school and community that embodies the motto we have had since we first started teaching in 2002: IMPROV IS FOR EVERYONE.
2. Fostering a culture built on diversity, respect, inclusion, care, support, and opportunity — from the classroom to the stage to the people behind the scenes and who make our decisions.
3. Improvolution is the collective sum of the individual differences, life experiences, knowledge, inventiveness, self-expression, unique capabilities and talents. We ALL benefit from the successes of everyone in our community.
4. We embrace and encourage differences in age, color, disability, ethnicity, family or marital status, gender identity or expression, language, national origin, physical and mental ability, political affiliation, race, religion, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, veteran status, and other characteristics that make our community unique.
WE STAND IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE BLACK LIVES MATTER MOVEMENT.
IMPROVOLUTION denounces white supremacy and unequivocally supports Black Lives Matter.
Immediately following the murder of George Floyd, we made a public commitment to stand in support of Black Lives and be a part of the long-term solution in response to systemic racism, state-sanctioned violence, and white supremacy. For us, it was important not just to make a statement, we also committed to putting meaningful and sustained action behind those words.
We stand in solidarity with all who are fighting against systemic racism, racial injustice, police brutality, white supremacy, hate, and hate crimes. We support protests, including artistic expression, to inform meaningful change, action, understanding, healing, and unity to drive our community forward.
We share in the sorrow over human destruction and oppression and the visible and invisible trauma that it manifests in the people and places we love.
We acknowledge as the owners and leaders of IMPROVOLUTION that we must do more to support social change, anti-racism, and the fight against the ongoing struggles of BIPOC people for equality on a local and national level; this work is unfinished and ongoing.
We commit to furthering racial equality and equity. We know art is a powerful instrument in the fight for and creation of a just, equal and diverse world.
We commit to examining and diversifying our curriculum, teaching body and student resources beyond the traditional European and white American canon, inclusive of Black voices, with sensitivity to appropriation. At the core of our work is our responsibility to represent, celebrate and amplify these diverse voices.
We commit to create a space that is welcoming, supportive, and respectful of all of our student’s voices, talents and experiences. And to create transparent pathways to maintain and improve this space on goingly.
We commit to diversifying our company, becoming an even stronger and vibrant example of an inclusive, respectful, and diverse community.
As leaders of this school and community, we commit to educating ourselves and our staff about our complicity and internalized white supremacy, and reflect on our own privilege and bias. We continue our anti-racist work and will continue in our pledge to becoming true allies to the Black Lives Matter movement. We have and will continue to consult with our BIPOC students and staff, hold space to listen, take effort to protest, and reflect on the accountability and actions we need to take now on a determined path to anti-racism.

Location

115 Macdougal Street
New York, NY, 10012

near 6th Avenue & W 3rd Street

Our school is located in the iconic Greenwich Village of Manhattan, surrounded by landmark cafes, restaurants and music venues. Classes take place in our studios here unless noted in the class description.