Allows free previews of over three million images pertaining to the perfoming arts.

This organization is the subject specialist network of performing arts collections in the UK and Ireland. You may browese their gallery and search their collections.

Documentary videos of American traditional life and culture. Users can browse by subject; there are approximately twenty videos about dance and drama.

Research portal for performing arts around the world.

IBDB (Internet Broadway Database) archive is the official database for Broadway theatre information. IBDB provides records of productions from the beginnings of New York theatre until today.

Contains clips and full viewings of PBS programs. Keyword searching "dance" or "theatre/theater" will return relevant programming.

From the Library of Congress, search and browse descriptions of more than 235 music, theater and dance resources by subject, title, or name.

A comprehensive database of Broadway history from Playbill Inc.

From the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, this database includes costume design and production design drawings, animation art, storyboards and paintings.

Choreography by George Balanchine: A Catalogue of Worksprovides a complete premiere-performance record of Balanchine’s creative output. Published to critical acclaim in a limited edition in 1983, and revised in 1984 for a broader release, this listing has now been expanded, updated, and converted into a searchable database accessible to all. The Catalogue, compiled by scholars and researchers in many parts of the world and prepared with Balanchine’s participation, covers a period of more than sixty years–from La Nuit at the Petrograd Theater Ballet School, choreographed in 1920 or earlier, to a revision of Stravinsky’sVariations for Orchestra for the New York City Ballet in 1982, his final production.

The DHC is a national alliance of institutions holding significant collections of materials documenting the history of dance. Its mission is to preserve, make accessible, enhance and augment the materials that document the artistic accomplishments in dance of the past, present, and future.

Contains over 500 hours of recorded dance videos, searchable by artist, genre, and material type.

DANCE is a shareware application that will need to be downloaded, and is also available for Android and iOS devices. DANCE allows users to learn dance moves through video and picture sequences, create your own dance moves, and animate, print, and export dance moves. This software has not been tested by the library.

Preserves images and videos of performances from 1937 to current day curated by America's longest running dance festival.

Features live webcasts of concerts and a catalog featuring over one thousand recordings, including portraits of artists, music documentaries, and educational programs. There are currently 34 dance videos.

The Siobhan Davies Archive project began in January 2007, with the aim of bringing together all of the materials and documentation associated with Davies' choreographies into a single collection. It is the first online dance archive in the UK and contains thousands of fully searchable digital records including moving image, still image, audio and text.

The 19th Century Actors and Theater Photographs database consists of over 600 photographs including cartes-de-visite and cabinet card studio portraits of entertainers, actors, and actresses who performed on the American stage in the mid- to late 1800s.

The Bunraku gallery of Japanese puppet theatre is divided into plays, productions, authors, backstage subjects, kashira, and characters. It documents the form's revival in the second half of the 20th century, through more than 12,500 slides and nearly 7,000 black-and-white photographs of rehearsals and performances.

Theaters on Postcards is Andreas Praefcke's postcard collection of theatres and concert halls worldwide. The images are organized by location, and are fairly decent quality. Images are available for non-commercial purposes. The author invites users to email him for higher quality images if needed.

Features images and reference information on French theatre, circa 17th and 18th centuries.

The site includes approximately 400 Shakespeare related images from publicity photographs featuring regional production companies --Cleveland's Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival, the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada and others; New York stage productions; motion pictures; and televised productions including several highly praised series (The Shakespeare Plays, Hallmark Hall of Fame, etc.)

ELTA's collection ranges from 1827 to the present day, including playbills and programs to press cuttings and photographs. It also has themed essays to contextualize the material and maps showing theatre locations.

The Federal Theatre Project (FTP) Materials Collection from George Mason University contains nearly one thousand different 35mm slides taken from original posters, set designs, and costume designs. These images are of the original designs used on posters to advertise FTP plays in many different American cities from 1935 to 1939. Also included are playscripts for twenty-two productions. The images are indexed by title, author, subject, theater, place, date, and related names.

From the University of Wisconsin, "This online collection of selected electronic facsimiles seeks to share the marriage between book art and Shakespearean text with a wider audience. It also suggests the variety of responses by visual and book artists to the stimulus of Shakespeare's words. This online collection, originally published in venues as disparate as Philadelphia and Leipzig, includes images produced by an array of technologies available in the 19th and early 20th centuries" Users can browse or search the collection. It contains high quality images, and its contents are available for educational use.

The Sayre Collection consists of more than 24,000 photographs of theatrical and vaudeville performers, musicians, and entertainers who played in Seattle between about 1900 and 1955 (some of the materials date back to the 1870s).

This site provides a visual chronicle of the artistic productions of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater in the years 1977-1994. The collection presents 1,800 images documenting 195 performances during these 17 seasons.

The Motley Collection of Theatre and Costume Design at UIUC is a valuable source of documentation on the history of theatre. It is a rare collection of original materials on the theatre comprising over 5000 items from more than 150 productions in England and the United States. These materials include costume and set designs, sketches, notes, photographs, prop lists, storyboards, and swatches of fabric.

Collections are searchable, or browsable by time period or category.

This collection of The Ohio State University Libraries' Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute includes costume and scene designs from more than fifty productions by British designer Daphne Dare (1929-2000). Dare designed for major theaters on both sides of the Atlantic as well as for television and film.

Portraits of Actors, 1720-1920 from UIUC includes almost 3,500 pictures of actors — studio portraits and actors posing in costume for a particular role or performing a scene from a play. Dramatists, theatrical managers, singers and musicians are also included, but the majority are British and American actors who worked between about 1770 and 1893. Among the hundreds of actors included are: Sarah Siddons, Edmund Kean, John Philip Kemble, Edwin Booth, Edwin Forrest, William Henry West Betty, Charles Mathews, Dorothy Jordan, Frances Abington, and Ada Rehan.

The collection includes photographs and ephemera relating to the career of Pat Prior and Effie Norris and the history of vaudeville. This includes images of friends and colleagues of Prior and Norris, identified and unidentified vaudeville performers of the late 1800s and early 1900, publicity postcards, and vaudeville stage productions, the most significant being Fanchon and Marco.

This database of images traces the history of stagecraft through Shakespearean prints, 18th, 19th and 20th century European and American handbills, posters and heralds, souvenir photographs and prints of the legendary performers of the past three centuries, numerous production and publicity stills of 20th century plays and films, and hundreds of individual photographs of the legendary and the now forgotten stars of minstrel, vaudeville and burlesque.

This collection is composed of three parts: the Twin City Scenic Company collection, the Great Western Stage Equipment Company Collection, and the Holak collection. The overall collection is the only one of its scope in the United States, and uniquely documents the technical environment of the popular stage during the late-nineteenth through early-twentieth century. Renderings and materials related to Freemason ceremonial performances are heavily represented in the Holak and Great Western collections.

Contains over 300 hours of recorded theatre performances.

The Vandamm archive documents almost comprehensively three decades of theatrical history in New York. The thousands of items in this digital presentation are a sampling of an archive of more than 75,000 images of theatrical personalities and productions. Images in the current presentation represent glass plate and acetate negatives primarily.

417 fashion plates from the Blanche Payne collection, including fashion from the Empire, Georgian, Regency, Romantic, Victorian, and Edwardian eras.

The Visual Accent & Dialect Archive (VADA) is an archive of video clips from around the world, providing both aural and visual information about an accent or dialogue.

Wayne State University maintains four costume collections, with a total of over 5,000 images. To browse the collections, click on one of the four listed collections. To search across collections, click on "costume collections."