UGA Arts Collaborative

Creativity and Collaboration

Creativity and Collaboration
Fall 2025 GradFIRST Seminar
https://grad.uga.edu/gradfirst/seminars/

Open to first-year graduate students

Creativity and collaboration are fundamental to addressing today’s socio-environmental challenges. This seminar will include arts-based, STEM-friendly activities developed by UGA researchers from the arts, humanities, and sciences designed to help students to think creatively, to collaborate across disciplines, and to work with people with different perspectives, knowledge, and values. It will be an engaging and fun way to enhance the creativity that you bring to your own graduate work and your capacity to effectively participate in collaborative teams.

Facilitator: Mark Callahan (UGA Arts Collaborative)

Fridays
1:50-2:40 PM
CRN:60768

2025 a2ru National Conference

2025 a2ru Conference
Call for Proposals
https://a2ru.org/event/2025-a2ru-conference-creative-futures/

a2ru’s next annual conference will take place October 23-25, 2025 at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. This will be an in-person conference.

This year’s theme, “Creative Futures: Driving Interdisciplinary Innovation Through the Arts,” explores how future-thinking in the arts can reimagine and redefine disciplines, collaboration, and the academy to better meet the demands of our rapidly shifting technological, ecological, and political landscape. How can we center creativity in the interdisciplinary problem solving needed to meet these current challenges? How can we use the arts to advance our goals of sustainability, social justice, and human flourishing? In this moment, how can the arts illuminate what it means to be a human being?

Nature Writing as Ecologists

Nature Writing as Ecologists: Literary Salon & Zine Release
Tuesday, May 6 from 5-7 PM
Ecology Building room 117

Ecology graduate students will share original works of creative writing on the theme of “nature writing as ecologists.’” Come ready to listen, mingle, and enjoy! Supported in part by an Arts Collaborative Mini Grant.

Zero Waste UGA Screening: The Cigarette Surfboard

Zero Waste UGA Film Screening: The Cigarette Surfboard
Wednesday, April 23 from 5 to 7:30 PM
Cine, 234 W. Hancock Ave.

Join Zero Waste UGA for a free screening of The Cigarette Surfboard and panel discussion with the filmmaker in a conversation about ocean stewardship and strategies to reduce single use plastics. The evening will include Regarding the Discarded, a temporary exhibition of art that engages material reuse and reduction.

https://www.thecigarettesurfboard.com

After a young designer realizes that a surfboard – which he crafted from thousands of littered cigarette butts picked up off California beaches – could captivate the eyes of millions across the globe, he decides to use it as the impetus to do something more. The Cigarette Surfboards become a platform to spark ocean stewardship and the symbol of a campaign to hold Big Tobacco accountable for their toxic, plastic waste. Surfing is the medium, but the message is universal.

Zero Waste UGA is an interdisciplinary experiential learning initiative to foster a culture of sustainability through waste reduction. The UGA campus will function as a living laboratory to support teaching, research, service and outreach, student engagement, and operational innovations toward a circular economy.

Event sponsors: UGA Office of Sustainability, UGA Sustainability Certificate, UGA Marine Extension / Sea Grant, UGA Arts Collaborative, UGA Department of Anthropology.

Conversation: Starting a Non-Profit

Arts Collaborative Conversation: Starting a Non-Profit Organization
Friday, April 11 at noon
Lamar Dodd Building Room S360

Join the founders of SonAlt Arts Organization (Claudia Aizaga, Sum Yee Lee, Mateo Wojtczack)
for a conversation on their journey of launching an arts nonprofit organization and organizing an
international music festival. The mission of SonAlt Arts is to empower emerging musicians
through classical and contemporary music-making that promote cultural exchange with Latin
America. Their upcoming realization of this mission will be the SonAlt Arts Music Festival in July
2026, where performers and composers from around the world will be invited to Otavalo,
Ecuador for a week of educational and performance opportunities.

For more information, visit: https://www.sonaltarts.org

Evolve in the African State of Mind: Performance

Nkululeko Zungu Doctoral Recital
Wednesday, March 19 at 6 PM
Dancz Center for New Music

Arts Collaborative Research Affiliate Nkululeko Zungu is a graduate candidate at UGA where his studies focus on contemporary writing styles in composition. He finds pleasure in exploring music from traditional Classical to modern Electronic and can be heard writing with the frame of mind, “Let me not, no, just add to the noise. Let me harmonize to the silence.” For more information, visit:
https://harmonizeto.pixpa.com