Announcing the Chancellor’s Council on the Arts and Faculty Funding Opportunities

Campus UpdateEventFaculty and Staff

Chancellor Block sent the following message to the UCLA campus community.

Dear Bruin Community:

The arts are an essential part of our lives: They encourage creativity and imagination, expose us to new ideas, provide opportunities for expression as well as reflection, and connect us across disciplines, geographies, backgrounds and perspectives. The arts have also long been central to our university and our region. To further advance the reach and influence of the arts at UCLA, I am pleased to formally announce the Chancellor’s Council on the Arts.

The Chancellor’s Council on the Arts brings together leaders from across our three professional arts schools, three public-facing arts organizations and the UCLA College Humanities Division to increase collaboration and coordination of arts activities and programming at UCLA. The goals of the council are to amplify and strengthen our artistic and cultural offerings, ensure their accessibility and substantive engagement with the campus and diverse regional communities, expand their impact, and garner the support required to position them for a bright future.

Eileen Strempel, inaugural dean of the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, is chair of the council. Its other members are:

• Marla C. Berns, Shirley & Ralph Shapiro Director, Fowler Museum
• Kristy Edmunds, executive and artistic director, UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance
• Brian Kite, interim dean, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television
• Ann Philbin, director, Hammer Museum
• David Schaberg, dean, Humanities and senior dean, UCLA College
• Brett Steele, dean, UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture

The council will soon launch a website that details the role of the arts at UCLA and their place within L.A.’s cultural ecosystem. A wonderful new resource for our campus and surrounding communities, the site will bring together for the first time a full array of UCLA arts events and content in one central location.

Along with the launch of the council, we have re-envisioned the UCLA Chancellor’s Arts Initiative to better support our faculty members’ arts-based research. This grant will be administered through a partnership between the Chancellor’s Council on the Arts and the Office for Research and Creative Activities. Awards will be made up to $15,000 and the deadline to apply is March 1. More information about the program, including eligibility and application requirements, can be found on the UCLA Research and Creative Activities website.

As a leading public university set within a global center of culture and creative industry, UCLA is uniquely positioned to showcase the power of the arts for those within our community and throughout the world. With so many talented performers, scholars, designers, artists, musicians, makers and thinkers at our institution, I look forward to working with the new Chancellor’s Council on the Arts to help make the arts an even more vital part of the UCLA experience.

Sincerely,