Mission and History: Overview
We focus on promoting cross-disciplinary approaches to the arts—in teaching, research, and art-making.
Drawing on Stanford’s strengths in collaboration and innovation, the Arts Institute exists to integrate the values and skills found in the arts throughout a Stanford University education.
What drives us? We believe that the arts reflect cultural values and transmit ways of being in the world, such as the experience of depth, differences of perspective, uncertainty, estrangement, and also a sense of belonging. They impart skills of collaboration, observation, abstraction, creativity, and representation. Such values and skills transcend individual artistic disciplines and can be applied to every facet of a university education. In our rapidly changing digital age, we are creating ways for these values to persist even as the forms of art, media environments, and habits of consumption undergo significant transformation.
What we do
The Stanford Arts Institute forges arts connections across the university, gives grants for faculty, staff, and students; presents arts events, incubates new projects and promotes artists and cultural groups across our campus. Since its founding in 2006, the Stanford Arts Institute has been a catalyst helping the Stanford arts community to grow.
