The ITI/UNESCO Chair "Theatre and Culture of Civilisations" was set up in 1998 within the framework of the UNESCO Chairs Programme, by UNESCO and the International Theatre Institute.

Under the direction of Prof. Corneliu Dumitriu – appointed by the Executive Council of ITI – the Chair works in close partnership with the ITI Theatre Education Committee, the ITI General Secretariat, as well as with the ITI network of National Centres and Cooperating Members. The ITI/UNESCO Chair is based in Romania and operates with the support of the Romanian governmental authorities and institutions.

The objectives of the ITI/UNESCO Chair are "to offer a means of coordinating research, documentation and publication activities in the area of theatre and film education, initiating and organising workshops, festivals and international co-productions between theatre schools and academies and to serve as a ‘centre of excellence’ for postgraduate and advanced training."

The ITI/UNESCO Chair’s international workshops for Tertiary Theatre Schools are an essential component of ITI's mission and ITI's Framework Agreement with UNESCO.

Workshops

Activities conducted throughout the workshops:

• Contributing to “exchanging information, ideas and teaching methods in the dramatic arts”
• Contributing to “improving actor training” by facilitating encounters between young performing artists and their teachers, enabling them to show work developed under a common theme
• Gathering within an international workshop, and around a common theme, young artists at the beginning of their careers, to exchange with each other
• Enabling participants to experiment with projects, which take artists beyond their differences, and on the basis of a shared artistic and professional identity, to build deep and durable friendships between artists of different countries
• Bringing together schools from different countries to work on major theatre forms (tragedy, comedy) and on the works of great universal dramatists from different languages and cultures – Shakespeare, Molière, Chekov, Lope de Vega etc.