Aesthetics and Criticism (DANC 6820)

Course description: This seminar is designed for advanced inquiry in selected areas of dance philosophy and criticism. The course focuses on fundamental questions of values in relationship to the arts.

Note: Students registering for this course should have a background in dance.

Arts Teaching Music and Dance Materials and Methods (ATFA 6030)

3 credits – Studio (Summer only)
Offered through the MATFA Program
Contact: Anne Dibble   

Course description: The course explores learner-centered practices as well as music and dance educational theories. During the summer residency, students experiment with process-based creative exploration and collaboration to develop critically informed arts-based teaching strategies for use in the classroom and community. This class requires both individual and collaborative work and provides lectures, creative place-making prompts, group discussions, and group assignments.

Arts Teaching Theatre, Media, and Visual Art Teaching Materials and Methods (ATFA 6015)

3 credits – Studio (Summer only)
Offered through the MATFA Program
Contact: Anne Dibble   

Course description: The course explores learner-centered practices as well as art, media, and theatre educational theories. During the summer residency, students experiment with process-based creative exploration and collaboration to develop critically informed arts-based teaching strategies for use in the classroom and community. The class requires both individual and collaborative work and provides lectures, creative place-making prompts, group discussions, and group assignments.

Dancing Bodies (DANC 6830)

2 credits – Seminar
Offered through the School of Dance
Contact: Eric Handman

Course description: This seminar examines dance as a cultural behavior. The course uses theoretical frameworks and diverse examples to discern the relationships between art-makers and their cultural and historical contexts.

Note: Students registering for this course should have a background in dance.

Introduction to Arts Administration (FA 6100)

3 credits – Online
Offered through the College of Fine Arts
Contact: Brooke Horjesi ()

Course Description: This is an exploratory course designed to introduce students to the various aspects of arts administration. We will explore what it means to be an arts administrator with topics of inquiry such as non-profit structure, mission statements, marketing, budgeting, board service, programming, and curation. Meets with FA 3100.

Representation in Film and Media* (FILM 6370)

4 credits – Special Topics Seminar
Offered through the Department of Film & Media Arts
Contact: Paula Lee ()

Course description: Cinema and media are inextricably linked to the experience of life in the modern world. This class is designed for documentarians, new media makers, theorists, philosophers, and fiction filmmakers who want to explore the relationship between film and media, human bodies, time, and the world “out there.” We will explore the theoretical underpinnings of contemporary questions, examining selfhood, subjectivity, notions of “the real,” the virtual, the uncanny, agency, and corporeality in relation to film and media. Through discussion of theoretical readings and film and media, including ethnography, autobiography, critical fabulation, structural film, interactive installations, documentary-fiction hybrids, narrative film, and contemporary social media algorithms, we will consider the question: what does it mean to “represent” via film and media?

*The topic of this course varies depending on who is teaching the course. 

Scholarly Writing (BALLE 6905)

2 credits – Seminar
Offered through the School of Dance
Contact: Melonie Murray

Course description: This graduate level course serves as an overview of a variety of approaches to creating and maintaining a scholarly writing practice.

Socially Engaged Art Making (ATFA 6300)

3 credits - Practicum
Offered through the MATFA Program
Contact: Anne Dibble   

Course description: Students use current research to inform their understanding of the process of creating artistic work in diverse educational settings. Students choose a classroom or community setting to extend their knowledge and application of the following: building and constructing a sequential arts teaching unit, developing art works in collaboration with community members, and honing instructional pacing (e.g., seamless transitions) and arts teaching behavior management. Students receive formal and informal coaching, observation, and feedback regarding the arts teaching units and video excerpts of the creative process throughout the practicum.

Note: Students registering for this course should have community or K-12 arts experience teaching, directing, conducting (instrumental or choral), artmaking, and choreographing alongside young people and communities

Visual Intersection (ARTH 6810)

3 credits - Seminar
Offered through the Department of Art & Art History
Contact: Lela Graybill () or Jessen Kelley ()

Course Description: An interdisciplinary seminar in visual culture open to graduate students across the university that will introduce and explore some of the diverse scholarly approaches to the production, use, interpretation and experience of images and visual representations. Through key theoretical texts and a series of historical and contemporary case studies, the course addresses a broad range of visual representations including different media and genre of the fine arts, performance, advertising and design, film, television, video and digital media. From this diverse material of visual culture, we ask a series of interrelated questions. What is visual culture? What are the politics and poetics of vision and visuality. What is the relationship of our daily experience of visuality to the academic study of images? How does the materiality of specific visual practices affect representation and visual experience? How do different media and technologies of representation affect discourses on race, class, gender, the body, art and culture?