The following projects demonstrate ways that the arts integrate into a wide range of knowledge domains, connect disciplines, engage with communities, build a sense of belonging, and create new meaning. These integrative arts research projects were made possible by funding from the Arizona Institute for Resilience and the Office of Research, Innovation and Impact in partnership with the CFA Arts Research Office.
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Resilience by Design: Crafting Artistic Pedagogies for the Next Generation of Healthcare Workers
An arts-integrated framework for high school healthcare Career and Technical Education courses utilizing Photovoice Pop-up Pedagogy, culminating in freely accessible and replicable curriculum resources for dissemination at regional and national levels. PIs: Carissa DiCindio (Art and Visual Culture Education), Denisse Brito (Center for Creative Photography), Amelia Kraehe (Arizona Arts), and Tarnia Newton (Nursing).
Practice As Research in the Arts
Workshops that bring together faculty, researchers, and creative practitioners to explore how artistic processes function as a form of research. Through interdisciplinary dialogue, embodied exercises, and collaborative exchange, the series strengthens documentation, impact, and grant readiness while building a cross-campus community around practice-led inquiry. PI: Ilayda Altuntas (Art and Visual Culture Education)
Resonant Ecologies: A Sound-Based Study of Resilience in Tucson’s Environmental and Human Landscapes
Using sound art as research, this project employs field recording, embodied listening, and interpretive analysis to examine how resilience-related conditions—heat, water systems, and built environments—become perceptible through sound in Tucson’s arid urban landscapes, producing curated works and a prototype digital sound study. PI: Ilayda Altuntas (Art and Visual Culture Education)
Building Low-Income Buffelgrass-Adobe Housing: Community-Student Partnership
Creating a site for people to work together to produce bricks using invasive grass to build a prototype low-income dwelling. Videos, books, and social media will educate the public and city officials about this material’s potential to solve Tucson’s pressing social and environmental challenges. PIs: Jacques Servin (visiting artist) and Sarah Lisette Chiesa (Dance).
The Climate Project: Trapeze Training for Resilience and Performance
Workshop series integrating new knowledge about climate change into embodied theatre practice through aerial trapeze, physical theatre creation, and ensemble development, culminating in a theatre performance. PI: Rick Wamer (Theatre, Film, and Television), Chris Impey (Science), Ilayda Altuntas, Joseph Farbrook, and Porter McDonald (Art), Delaney Wamer (Artist), and Nate Dryden (Aerialist).
El Pueblo 50: Celebrating the Living Heart of Tucson’s Southside
Community co-curated public exhibition that presents stories of Tucson’s Southside resiliency, commemorating El Pueblo Center’s 50-years of cultural and environmental advocacy. PIs: Jacqueline Barrios (Public and Applied Humanities), Rebecca Senf (Center for Creative Photography), Kenny Wong (Landscape Architecture and Planning), Liz Soltero and Selina Barajas (Sunnyside Foundation).
Ground|Water II: Water Advocacy of the Santa Cruz
Project utilizing spatial design tools, image-making, and storytelling to enable students, artists and scholars to work with the community to support water justice advocacy along the Santa Cruz River, uplifting Tucson’s Southside stories of environmental resilience. PIs: Martina Shenal (Art) and Jacqueline Barrios (Public and Applied Humanities).
Artistic Expression of Original Research
Three-day retreat for STEM graduate students to learn artistic research methods and techniques to communicate their scientific research, culminating in three interactive community exhibitions. PI: Jessica Maccaro (visiting artist/scientist).
Energetic Presence of the Moving Body Left in Space
Series of workshops that combine elements of performance art, somatic experience, and social engagement to explore and manifest the energetic dynamics of human communities and cultures, held in traditional and non-traditional performance spaces internationally. PI: Sarah Lisette Chiesa (Dance).
Watershed Soundscape: Building Community Through Music, Art and Watershed Science
Interdisciplinary project that fuses environmental science with sensory experiences to promote engagement, education, and stewardship of the Santa Cruz River Watershed. PI: Sara Fraker and Jackie Glazier (Music).
Against the Grain: Black Experience in Barbershop, Trent Williams, Dance
A choreographic work, dance-documentary, and community research project inspired by the legacy of Bobbie E. Moore—an African American barber who served Houston’s Fifth Ward for nearly 30 years— to address the economic, cultural, social, and political injustices in America through investigating identity. PI: Trent Williams (Dance).
Waila Music Workshop with Gertie Lopez
Workshop and social dance event using decolonizing and Indigenizing frameworks to engage students and community members in Tohono O’odham Waila music practices. PI: Gabriela Ocadiz (Music).
Music & Health Story Lab
Ongoing, public-facing research project promoting dialogue about music as a vehicle for creative wellbeing across the lifespan. Featuring student-made work informed by creative ethnographic methods, the platform showcases collaboratively-produced stories that evoke connections between music, health, creativity, and care. PI: Jennie Gubner (Music, GIDP in Applied Intercultural Arts Research).
La Peña del SurCo
Latin American folk music gathering and applied intercultural arts and health project that explores how Latin American models of cultural organizing and participatory music making can be leveraged to promote intergenerational wellbeing and diasporic belonging in Tucson. PI: Jennie Gubner (Music, GIDP in Applied Intercultural Arts Research).
Augmented Reality Mural: Tucson Village Farm and Illustration Students
Public art mural digitally activated by moving images and audio creating an immersive viewing and learning experience to support Tucson Village Farm’s mission to empower youth, strengthen families, and provide a resilient community-centered food system. PI: Jenn Liv (Art).
Hearing the Invisible
Immersive installation combining multiple artistic disciplines to explain a new scientific discovery. Visitors experience an original musical composition based on the brain wave patterns of healthy individuals and those with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. PIs: Cynthia Stokes (Music) and Tally Largent-Milnes (Medicine).
Library of the More-than-Humane
Global research initiative collecting and exhibiting handmade bestiaries that express more-than-human ethics, accessible to students, researchers and the general public. PIs: Hai Ren (East Asian Studies) and Jonathon Keats (College of Fine Arts Research Associate).
Making Arizona
A documentary series exploring how global climate change is affecting Arizona. The videos amplify the experiences of a diverse range of Arizonans who demonstrate a resilient, resourceful response to the resulting effects of global climate change; drought, fire and extreme heat. PI: Michael Mulcahy (Theatre, Film and Television).
Imagination 1: All Artist Simulated Moon Mission
Six-day mission by four artists to establish the foundational value of the arts in space exploration, as humans consider how to cultivate ethical, sustainable and flourishing communities beyond Earth. PIs: Christopher Cokinos (Department of English), Liz George (School of Dance), Julie Swarstad (Poetry Center) and Ivy Wahome (School of Theatre, Film and Television).
Deep Time Photography
Multi-site project that documents environmental change in the Sonoran Desert through a single 1,000-year long photographic exposure of the landscape challenging the public to take future generations into account in the decisions they make today. PIs: Jonathon Keats (College of Fine Arts Research Associate) and Brett Blum (Southern Arizona Experiment Station).
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