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Contacts: Sally Corbett, sacorbe@emory.edu, 404-727-6678
Jessica Moore, jkmoore@emory.edu, 404-727-1687

For more information, visuals, or to arrange an interview, please email creativity@emory.edu.

Emory University Creativity & Arts Initiative to Enhance "Collaborative Imagining"

For immediate release: May 30, 2008

Contact: Sally Corbett, Director of Communications & Marketing, Emory College Center for Creativity & Arts, 404.727.6678, sacorbe@emory.edu

Emory University fully embraces creativity and the arts as an essential part of its educational mission by recognizing the significant effect creativity and the arts can have in strengthening teaching, learning, research and discovery. Emory University's strategic plan is permeated by both. The University's Creativity & Arts Initiative implements programs to support this campus-wide commitment. The Initiative collaborates with and brings greater attention to Emory's strengths in the arts and partners with other pursuits across the disciplines, including entities involved in drug discovery, creativity and psychoanalysis, special collections, entrepreneurship, understanding race and difference and more. Emory is also forging and strengthening community partnerships with institutions that take the lead in innovation, collaboration and excellence in their fields, such as Georgia Institute of Technology, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the Atlanta Opera and others. Additionally, research, study and public discourse on creativity is supported by the Initiative. Dialogue with other universities interested in innovation is underway with Vanderbilt, Stanford, Columbia and others.

"The Creativity & Arts Initiative will build a strong sense, both on campus and off, that Emory is an exceptional place for creative and artistic endeavors, interdisciplinary exchange and innovation," says Rosemary Magee, Ph.D., Vice President and Secretary of the University. "Collaborative and transformative imagining is being encouraged across the many parts of the University. Since artists create new knowledge and new ways of seeing, arts programs and departments on campus will play a particularly important role in the Initiative."

The Initiative is led by Dr. Magee and a cross-disciplinary executive committee including Bill Eley, M.D., M.P.H., Executive Associate Dean for Medical Education & Student Affairs; Robert Paul, Ph.D., Dean of Emory College, Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Charles Howard Candler Professor of Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Studies; and Leslie Taylor, M.F.A., Executive Director, Emory College Center for Creativity & Arts and Chair, Department of Theater Studies.

Emory is uniquely poised to study the creative process and creative breakthroughs as it has neuroscientists, psychologists, curators, theologians, scientists, sociologists, artists and others who have studied creativity through various lenses. To broaden understanding, the Initiative encourages the collaborative convergence of thoughts, processes and theories about creativity. "How do ideas come to be? What influence does society or neurological condition have on creativity? How do people see themselves as creative beings? How does the brain shape creative impulses? What are some of the barriers to the examination of the creative process? Together our scholars and artists can delve into questions that are not easily answered through researching in a single discipline," adds Magee. Scholarship around creativity can open new pathways to the discovery of solutions to societal challenges such as emerging diseases, cultures in conflict and the rapidly changing marketplace.

In 2008/2009, the Initiative will encourage dialogue between artists and scientists as it supports the commissioning of art in conjunction with the Future of Evolution conference. Artists will participate in the October conference presented by the Emory Computational and Life Sciences and respond to it with works that will be presented in 2009. Similarly, collaborative programs are planned that include a multi-disciplinary effort between the Michael C. Carlos Museum, Schwartz Center, Atlanta Opera and Department of Music; "The Fine Excess: Three-Day Celebration of Poetry" planned by the Manuscript Archives and Rare Book Library of the Emory Libraries and National Endowment for the Arts and more.

The Initiative also works within Emory to encourage creative solutions to environmental, human relations and management challenges that many organizations face. For instance, efforts to become a more environmentally sustainable campus will be encouraged through collaboration with the Emory Office of Sustainability Initiatives. "An awareness of our environment informs our sensibilities and calls upon our creative energies," says Magee.

In collaboration with the new Emory College Center for Creativity & Arts, the Initiative recently launched "Out There Arts" (off-campus arts field trip grant program for students and classes), the "Emory Arts Passport" (an incentive program aimed at increasing student attendance at campus arts events) and a variety of project grant and artist commissioning programs.

The Initiative supports a variety of events, exhibitions, lectures and projects each year. The ongoing series "Creativity Conversations," features discussions on creativity and the creative process with such notable artists and scholars as Joshua Bell, violin; Steven Tepper, sociologist; Katherine Mitchell, visual artist; and Salman Rushdie, author. The recordings of these conversations are posted at www.creativity.emory.edu. Steven Tepper, a researcher on the qualities that make a campus creative, made a two-day visit to Emory to present to leaders, students and the community. The Initiative also sponsored "Stir: Student Arts Festival" and the Emory Visual Arts Gallery presentation of the touring exhibition "Selections from the 'Missing Piece: Artists Consider the Dalai Lama.'"

In collaboration with the Public Art Committee, the Initiative is working to enliven the campus with sculpture and site-specific installations by renowned, emerging and mid-career artists. The hope is to double the number of works of art on campus within the next five years; literally changing people's view of Emory's campus through visually provocative, colorful and imaginative artwork.

The Creativity & Arts Initiative was established by the University administration and board of trustees as part of the Emory University Strategic Plan in 2006. "We must ask the arts and the humanities to help us define what it means to be fully, humanly alive, to live in community, to understand our souls and to express ourselves with the full range of communication that goes beyond words to the celebration of our humanity. That is a tall order. It is one that we at Emory must invest in. And for that reason the theme of creativity and the arts is not merely one among many themes in the Emory Strategic Plan, it is one of the fundamental goals and building blocks of what we are attempting to become," said President James Wagner in his State of the University address on September 26, 2006.

For more information about the Creativity & Arts Initiative, the public may go online to www.creativity.emory.edu or email rhays@emory.edu