Last year, Playbill launched its new feature series, How Did I Get Here, which spotlights not only actors, but directors, designers, musicians, and others who work on and off the stage to create the magic that is live theatre.

Since that time, over 70 artists have shared their journeys to Broadway, including the many conservatories, colleges, and graduate schools that were pivotal to their eventual success.

Below, as part of Playbill's Back to School Week coverage, we compiled 25 theatre professionals' answers to the question, "Where did you train/study?" Read their responses, and click here for the full series of interviews.

Stage manager Christopher Kee Anaya-Gorman
I received my BFA in Stage Management from the University of Arizona (go Wildcats!). It was an excellent program to learn within, and that’s been more evident as I met younger stage managers coming out of school and discussing their programs. At the U of A, I worked alongside MFA students as an undergrad on main stage productions with full performance schedules, understudy rehearsals, automation, fly rail, traps, etc., all in conjunction with our coursework.

Director and actor Michael Arden
I attended the Interlochen Arts Camp and Academy and The Juilliard School of Drama.

Actor Roman Banks
I consider my training ongoing, but I officially trained for a year at Shenandoah Conservatory as a musical theatre major! However, high school programs like YoungArts and the Georgia Governor's Honors Program taught me key lessons about ethics and my craft that I still utilize today.

Costume designer Gregg Barnes
I have my BFA in English Literature from San Diego State University and an MFA in design from New York University.

Music director and conductor Kristen Blodgette
I began taking piano lessons when I was four years old. I took piano lessons, violin lessons (violin lessons didn’t last long, as I was terrible), voice lessons, and played French Horn. I ultimately graduated from the Cincinnati-College Conservatory of Music with a degree in Piano Performance and attended graduate school at CCM in Opera and Accompanying. I had a graduate assistantship in the opera department and had the wonderful opportunity to work in most of the voice studios and the opera studio.

Vocal, text and dialect coach Gigi Buffington
I trained with Robert Neff Williams in his two-year Voice, Speech and Shakespeare program after two years with Maggie Flanigan at William Esper Studio. A decade later, I received my master's at The Guildhall School of Music & Drama in Training Actors (Voice) followed by a Post Graduate Award from the University of Warwick in Teaching Shakespeare to Actors and Artists.

Actor Jonathan Burke
I began my training as an actor major at the Baltimore School for the Arts for high school and trained at the Arena Players [Youtheater] while matriculating through high school. I then went on to receive my BFA in musical theatre from Ithaca College.

Lighting designer Isabella Byrd
I was lucky to have early exposure to the arts growing up, which led me to a public Houston school, HSPVA (High School for the Performing and Visual Arts). I dove deep into theatre then while also studying dance at the Houston Ballet Academy. That gave me the confidence to apply for conservatory college track—where I chose CCM, University of Cincinnati—studying lighting design. It was wonderful to work within so many performance styles at school—theatre, musical theatre, opera, and dance.

I did not go to grad school, but instead joke that I went to the school of hard knocks: New York City! This incredible city is fundamental to the artist I am striving to become.

Actor Nick Cearley
I grew up in Fairfield, Ohio, right outside the Cincinnati/Dayton area and went to Fairfield High School. I went to Boston Conservatory and got my BFA in Musical Theatre.

Set and costume designer Bunny Christie
I went to Central School of Art, where I did a foundation course and then a degree in Theatre Design.

Actor Jordan Dobson
Temple University’s musical theatre program in Philadelphia. But every show I do is like an additional education, so I’m still studying!

Actor Hawley Gould
I did so much theatre as a kid. It was really those school shows and community theatres that fostered my love of performance, long before I ever imagined that it could be my literal job. I’ll never forget how Paula Dawson and Ally Van Deuren cast me as a Wickersham Brother in seventh grade and let me dance down the aisles during “Oh, the Thinks You Can Think!” That actually changed my life’s trajectory forever. More "seriously," I received my BFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts, training at the New Studio on Broadway.

Actor Dorian Harewood
I studied at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, training with the great mezzo soprano, Lucile V. Evans.

Actor Judy Kaye
I studied theatre and voice at UCLA. I was part of a course of study called The Acting Specialization. It was something of a conservatory within the theatre major. We studied voice and diction, stage movement, mask and mime, Shakespeare scene study, and acting. I was also a member of the Opera Workshop and the Musical Comedy Workshop.

Actor Telly Leung
I graduated from Carnegie Mellon University's School of Drama.

Musical director, conductor, and arranger John McDaniel
I went to Carnegie Mellon University as an actor, and I have a degree in drama.

Actor Jessie Mueller
I started voice lessons in high school and then went to Syracuse University, studying in their musical theatre and acting programs.

Director Jack O'Brien
As Catherine Sloper states in The Heiress, “I was taught by masters.“ I was an English major at the University of Michigan, clueless about my future when I fell under the spell of the late Ellis Rabb’s wonderful APA Repertory Company, which was in residence at the University. I stalked, pursued, cajoled, and entertained until Ellis finally offered me to be his assistant during the New York season. For the next five or six years, I took notes for him, John Houseman, Eva Le Gallienne, Alan Schneider, and Stephen Porter—learning the styles, the insights, the attack of these virtual giants, as the only assistant the little company could afford. It changed my life.

Stage manager Danielle Ranno
I am mostly self-taught. I started out as an acting major at Alexander Dreyfoos School of the Arts. We were working on a class project in my theatre history class, and our group needed someone to act as the stage manager, so I volunteered. I didn’t have much knowledge of what a stage manager did… I knew that they called cues for lighting, sound, etc. and wrote down blocking.

After that, I did not revisit stage management until I was in college. My sophomore year I went to USITT [United States Institute for Theatre Technology]. To help pay for the conference, I worked a few hours a day in the computer lab. On a break, I was walking through an exhibition floor and saw a booth that caught my eye for the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey. I interviewed for a summer internship and later found out I got in! I told myself that if I could survive the 12 weeks and still enjoyed it, then I knew that stage management was what I wanted to do. Since my college was a BA program and (at the time) did not offer any SM specific classes, I did a lot of faking it until I made it. I spent all my free time looking at different types of paperwork and recreating it. I attribute a lot of my early SM education to this summer program.

Video and projection designer Finn Ross
Central School of Speech and Drama, London. My degree was in alternative theatre—24 years later, I am still not sure exactly what that means, but it did give me a lot of room to experiment and find my way into video.

Actor Jennifer Simard
I trained at The Boston Conservatory—honestly, watching and doing over and over again and gaining experience.

Costume designer Paul Tazewell
Undergraduate: Pratt Institute and University of North Carolina School of the Arts. Graduate: New York University Tisch School of the Arts.

Actor Kara Young
New York Conservatory for Dramatic Arts, Labyrinth Theater Company, all over New York, and still studying.

Costume Designer Paloma Young
BA in U.S. History from UC Berkeley, MFA in Costume and Sound Design from UC San Diego.

Set and costume designer David Zinn
This is a long answer to a simple question, but I feel like I really began my study while I was in high school (in the Pacific Northwest) and my local community theatre, as well as some of the theatres in Seattle, gave me a place and community to start to study and learn what theatre design was all about. But, more formally, I came to NYU right after high school in 1987. At the time they had a (since-discontinued) program where you could be enrolled in the graduate design program as an undergraduate, and so I did that, not really knowing exactly what I was getting myself into. It was very hard, but I was surrounded by a ton of folks that continue to inspire me: Marsha Ginsberg, Paul Tazewell, Christine Jones, Constance Hoffman. Gregg Barnes and Kitty Leech were downstairs in the undergraduate costume shop, Moisés Kaufman directed at ETW [Experimental Theatre Wing]. It was a cool time to be there.