Sean Cusick

Cusick's career at The Annoyance and Second City spans the two main poles of Chicago's improv and sketch tradition. The Annoyance, founded by Mick Napier, developed an approach to comedy and ensemble work that emphasized irreverence and performer autonomy in a way that stood in deliberate contrast to the more structured revue process at Second City. Working in both institutions gave Cusick exposure to the full range of Chicago's comedy methodologies.

The Neutrino Project represented an important strand of Chicago experimental improv that pushed the form toward hybridity with film and documentary, producing performances that required performers to improvise in relationship to live video capture and editing. Cusick's participation in the project extended his practice into that experimental space.

His move into university-level instruction at Columbia College Chicago's Comedy Studies program represents a broader trend in the institutionalization of Chicago improv pedagogy within higher education, where practitioners with long careers in professional comedy have increasingly been brought in to formalize what had previously been transmitted informally through studio training.

Cusick's teaching at The Second City and The Annoyance Theatre represents an unusual combination of Chicago's two most institutionally distinct improv traditions, giving his pedagogy a cross-institutional perspective that few Chicago teachers develop. His work at the Annoyance, which he joined in 2003, exposed him to that theater's character-forward, emotionally unfiltered approach to ensemble comedy, an aesthetic that prioritizes genuine behavioral commitment over structural craft. His subsequent engagement with Second City, beginning in 2004, added the character-based scene work and conservatory curriculum that the Second City tradition has systematized over six decades of professional production and training.

His role as curriculum designer at Second City is central to what distinguishes him as a pedagogue. Where most improv teachers develop their approach intuitively through years of performing and coaching, Cusick has also engaged with the analytical work of designing learning sequences, identifying what skills need to be taught in what order, and articulating why particular exercises develop particular competencies. This systematic dimension of his practice gives his teaching an intentionality that extends beyond the transmission of technique to the structured design of learning experiences.

His work with the Neutrino Project, an improv performance format in which performers create characters and scenes in real time in public locations while live musicians score the action, extends his teaching into an unusual performance context that tests the transferability of core improv principles across dramatically different environmental and structural conditions.

His two decades across The Annoyance, Second City, and independent improv projects have given him fluency in multiple Chicago traditions, and his curriculum design background has allowed him to reflect on those traditions analytically rather than simply practicing them. His facilitation work in organizational and professional development contexts applies this same analytical clarity to the challenge of making improv principles accessible to non-performer audiences.

Cusick's combined work as curriculum designer at the Second City Training Center and as a faculty member in Columbia College Chicago's Comedy Studies program positions him as one of the practitioners who has actively worked to codify and transmit Chicago's comedy traditions across both commercial and academic settings. The Comedy Studies program at Columbia College is one of the few university-level programs in the country focused on comedy as a discipline, and his presence there connects professional improv and sketch practice to formal academic study.

His work with Second City Works extends the improv curriculum he helped develop at the Training Center into applied settings, reaching corporate and organizational clients rather than aspiring performers alone. That breadth of application reflects a sustained commitment to comedy education beyond stage performance.