Fr. Grant Garinger, S.J., is an Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts with an MFA in Directing for Theatre, Video, and Cinema from the California Institute of the Arts. Fr. Grant comes to LMU from Marquette University where he has been teaching and directing in the Performing Arts and Broadcasting Departments for the past four years. While at MU he taught classes in Script and Continuity, Intro to Acting for Stage, Directing for Stage, Acting for the Camera, Production Techniques (i.e., how to use a camera, mic, and edit it all together), and Film History. Recently he has directed the stage plays As It Is In Heaven by Arlene Hutton, Black Eagles by Leslie Lee, and the musical The Velveteen Rabbit by James Still, part of Marquette’s Theatre for Children program. He also wrote and directed four narrative vignettes of the educational DVD project Violence Against Women: Together We Can Make It Stop produced by MU’s Office of Student Affairs and the Instructional Media Center with a grant from the Violence Against Women Office, Office of Justice Programs, U.S.Department of Justice. Also at MU he has been the advisor to the Marquette University Players Society, the student run theatre group, the Alpha Sigma Nu Honor Society MU student chapter, and the Sensory Cinema Society.

Fr. Grant was born and raised in Milwaukee, WI and studied Commercial Art in high school and Fine Art as an undergraduate. He has a BA in painting, and a BA in philosophy, from Saint Louis University; a Masters of Divinity from the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley; and his Master of Fine Arts from CalArts.

Fr. Grant has been a Jesuit in the Wisconsin Province, Society of Jesus, for the past twenty-three years, and an ordained Roman Catholic priest since 1997. While at MU he has presided at university liturgies, and participated in retreats and spiritual direction for students, faculty, and staff, as well as various student discussion diversity events, and was a Hall Minister (Resident Chaplain) at Mashuda