Connect with Innovations to Be Inspired
Artistic expression is a powerful facilitator for communication, education, and healing. Be it through dance, song, storytelling, or visual media, the arts help people to make sense of the world. Creating and enjoying the arts builds resilience by enabling individuals to cope with hardships, recover from trauma, and imagine a better future. When the arts are used as entry points for dialogue on challenging subjects, they can lead to understanding and compassion as well as inspire courage and collective action.
Our innovations programming aims to improve lives locally and globally through meaningful application of the arts, culture, and heritage to individual and collective human flourishing. We do this by:
- Developing and fostering artistic citizenship with students, faculty, and staff.
- Enabling the co-creation and application of knowledge with community and international partners.
- Strengthening interdisciplinary collaboration and minimizing departmental silos.
Arizona Arts Connect provides technical support, workspace, and other resources to advance innovative ideas and initiatives that are relevant and have tangible results for communities near and far:
Design by Deb Ruiz
Podcasting
Podcasting is an intimate, time-based art form where sound, collaboration, and narrative are tools for making meaning together. Students, faculty, and staff participate as guest hosts, audience members, and creative contributors to Race/Remix, an Arizona Arts podcast that presents dialogues about challenging topics with artists, performers, educators and thought leaders. Each episode unlocks the power of imagination, creating new knowledge one conversation at a time.
Photo by Ana Urias
PhotoVoicing
PhotoVoicing brings the experiences and perspectives of borderland communities into the foreground to engage audiences in new ways of seeing (and feeling) what it means to be well. With the goal of advancing community-based health resilience, students in art and nursing collaborate with faculty to apply visual methods, storytelling, and curation to create interactive exhibitions for campus and community.
PhotoVoicing is binational collaboration of the College of Fine Arts and the Colleges of Nursing at the U of A, Universidad De Sonora (Hermosillo, Mexico), and Instituto Interamericano de Educación Superior para la Salud (Guaymas, Mexico).
Image from Art Works
Story Lab
Music & Health Story Lab produces student-generated narratives about the relationships between music, health and wellness. Each story inspires caregivers, artists, healthcare professionals, and community members to critically reimagine how music and the arts can be harnessed as tools in living healthier lives and resilient communities. This initiative engages students in applying multimodal and ethnographic storytelling techniques.
Design by Arshia Amin
Speaker Series
Black Faculty Speaker Series fosters critical dialogue within academia through student fireside chats, keynote lectures, and community engagement. The series celebrates the intellectual and cultural contributions of the African Diaspora in the US and around the world. All events are free and open to the public.
Arizona Arts is a proud partner of the series. Listen to conversations with previous guests, including Ruha Benjamin and Silas Munro, on the Race/Remix podcast.