Welcome to a new semester at UGA! If this is your first visit to the UGA Arts Collaborative website, please take a few moments to explore and learn about some of the current and past projects and events. You may be interested in joining the Arts Collaborative listserv, a newsletter with local events and opportunities in the arts.
Please also welcome our new recipients of Graduate Assistantships in Interdisciplinary Arts Research: Edward Hemphill (Art), Julien Berger (Music), and Mingjun Han (Theatre and Film). These exceptional graduate students will develop creative research and collaborative work across disciplines with faculty, students, and community members.
As an a2ru member institution, UGA students, faculty, and staff are eligible for discounted registration.
The a2ru national conference is an opportunity for practitioners and researchers from across higher education to share innovations and perspectives in the arts. a2ru advances the full range of arts- and design-integrative research, curricula, programs, and creative practice to acknowledge, articulate, and expand the vital role of higher education in our global society. a2ru’s work, in partnership with an international network of leading higher education institutions, allies, and partners, envisions a world in which universities—students, faculty, and leaders—explore, embed, and integrate the arts in everyday practice and research.
Arts Collaborative Mini Grants Call for Proposals No deadline
Arts Collaborative Mini Grants support new creative interdisciplinary projects and modes of collaboration. Teams must include participants from multiple academic departments and include a UGA student or faculty member to serve as a primary contact. Grant recipients are provided with a project mentor and up to $1000 in support for qualified expenses. Proposals will be reviewed on a rolling basis, pending the availability of funds.
– Brief description of project, goals, and challenges
– Names and roles of collaborators
Special consideration will be given to proposals that engage the following themes:
– Circular UGA initiative
– Artificial Intelligence (AI)
– Arts and health
– Arts and environment
The Mini Grant Program is supported by the UGA Arts Collaborative, an interdisciplinary initiative for advanced research in the arts. The Arts Collaborative is supported in part by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, and the Graduate School.
As a member institution of the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru), UGA may nominate up to four student representatives. Please contact mark.callahan@uga.edu by October 29 for more information about how to participate.
Join us for an information session with a2ru Research Program Manager Veronica Stanich, who facilitates the Emerging Creatives Student Summit each year. Learn more about the Emerging Creatives experience, student outcomes, and the nominations process, and get your questions answered! Registration is free and open to all.
a2ru is delighted to announce that this year’s Emerging Creatives Student Summit will be hosted by the University of Maryland on its College Park campus March 18-21, 2027. This year’s theme is “Power.”
Power comes from a solar panel or burning fuel, an idea or a group of people in motion. A work of art is powerful; so is a dictator. Power lends the capacity to control events and even people; power feeds, inspires, motivates and detonates. Where does power come from? What can we do with it? What should we do with it? (What would Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben say?)
Emerging Creatives is a three-day collaborative experience in which students form small cross-disciplinary teams to explore a specific area of the Summit’s theme. Over the course of the event, teams make something that represents their exploration: a syllabus, cookbook, podcast, app, opera, pair of shoes, urban blueprint, pop-up store, musical score, website…the list of possible outcomes is endless.
At Emerging Creatives, students not only envision and create their project; they also participate in hands-on experiences related to the Summit theme, meet extraordinary interdisciplinary thinkers, practice presenting their work, and exchange ideas about their project with peers and experts. Students also build collaboration skills in micro-workshops with a2ru staff.
Drawing on responses from more than 1,700 alumni across the United States, the latest SNAAP Pulse survey turns to community engagement, asking respondents how creativity shapes their identity, how they support the arts, and how connected they feel to the places where they live. The results paint a hopeful but nuanced picture. While day-to-day participation in arts and cultural life varies, nearly all respondents say creativity is central to their identity. Most actively support the arts, and many report a strong sense of belonging in their communities, even as they highlight opportunities to strengthen support for artists and arts education.
The Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) is a leader in enabling scholarship and insights that bolster the lives and careers of postsecondary arts graduates. SNAAP defines “arts” broadly, encompassing art, architecture, design, media arts, film, music, theater, dance, and creative writing.
For nearly two decades, SNAAP data have informed the national conversation on the value of an arts degree by collecting, examining, and sharing data on over 300,000 arts alumni from more than 400 educational institutions across 49 states, the District of Columbia, and four Canadian provinces. SNAAP data are considered the gold standard for what is known about intensive arts education.
Roulston, Kathryn., Acheampong, Kwame O., Callahan, Mark, Nibbelink, Nathan, King, Elizabeth, and Haas, Brian. “Implementation of a Curricular Intervention to Enhance Imaginative and Collaborative Capacity Among Graduate STEM Students.” Thinking Skills and Creativity. (2026).
Findings indicate that participation in learning opportunities involving collaboration across disciplines provided significant opportunities for students to reflect on the meaning of creativity and collaboration in relation to their work and disciplinary interests, and how they might engage in interdisciplinary work in the future.
Featured in a special issue on “Understanding, Designing, and Teaching the Curriculum to Incorporate the Cultivation of Thinking Skills,” the article shares research from a series of arts-based workshops developed at UGA with the support of an Innovations in Graduate Education award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The grant provided $499,835 of research funding to the university and represented a partnership of campus programs including the UGA Arts Collaborative and the Center for Integrative Conservation Research.
Based on student feedback and the success of pilot programs supported by the Graduate School and the Willson Center for the Humanities and Arts, a team of researchers from the arts, humanities, and sciences worked together to design activities to train students to think creatively, to collaborate across disciplines, and to work with people with different perspectives, knowledge, and values.
Hundreds of crawling critters have taken up residence in Cedar Street Building B on the University of Georgia Athens campus, but there is no need to panic. The multi-legged neighbors are part of the newly reopened UGA Insect Zoo. Supported by the Department of Entomology at the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, the zoo aims to not only educate but also ease the fear that often accompanies arthropod sightings.
The spacious new location is open to the public and can accommodate greater numbers of visitors. A colorful mural featuring the zoo’s arthropods, supported in part by the UGA Arts Collaborative, welcomes visitors to the new space. The illustrations were created by students in the scientific illustration program at UGA’s Lamar Dodd School of Art.
This is a pivotal moment in recognizing the essential role of the arts in service to society through the evolution of neuroarts, a field emerging at the intersection of the arts, science, and technology. For decades, artists, scientists, clinicians, arts practitioners, educators, technologists, architects, culture bearers, and others with either professional expertise or lived experience have independently advanced how creative and aesthetic experiences shape the human brain and body, as well as our behavior and wellbeing.
