Fathom, Camille Utterback (2025)
artsCatalyst Fellows
Open to Faculty & Teaching Staff
Do you have a novel idea for deeply integrating art with scholarship in a course that you teach, or want to teach? Are you already experimenting with interdisciplinary arts integration?Â
Overview
The artsCatalyst Fellows program will bring together a cohort of course instructors each year to discuss arts integration pedagogy, to workshop course ideas and syllabus strategies, and to develop bigger ideas around roles for art in teaching and research across wide-ranging academic disciplines.Â
Eligibility
Open to faculty (professoriate and academic teaching staff) applying individually or in pairs, including individual instructors in search of interdisciplinary course development partners. Applicants requesting assistance in finding interdisciplinary course development partners are encouraged to submit their proposals early. Priority will be given to proposals that integrate arts with non-art disciplines.Â
Future support
Fellows are encouraged to propose the courses they develop to their home department(s) for the following academic year. SAI will gladly cross-list any department-approved courses (ARTSINST) and will have limited funds available to support course activities and materials. Please note, SAI is not able to provide funding to cover instructor salaries, and all courses will require approval of at least one home department.
Applications for 2026-27 open May 4
Please check back in spring 2026 for details about applying to the 2026-27 Fellowship Cohort
aC Fellow-Initiated Workshops & Activities
Using Narrative to Green University Culture and Curricula
Session with with Lydia Dean Pilcher
Feb 20, noon-1:30PM
artsCatalyst lead: Ben Mylius
What does it actually take to bring climate into the heart of a university's teaching, as a context that reshapes how disciplines think? Filmmaker, cultural strategist, and educator, Lydia Dean Pilcher has spent the last several years building answers to this question. At Columbia Climate School, she created an interdisciplinary graduate course that brings together students from the sciences, policy, and the arts to examine how narrative forms shapes climate perception and response. She has also been in conversation with a range of other university experts and institutions, including Columbia and NYU, and Yale University, about what "greening the curriculum" means in practice: what institutional conditions enable it, what resistance it encounters, and where cultural and narrative strategy can do work that scientific literacy alone cannot.
In this session, Fellows meet with filmmaker and producer Lydia Dean Pilcher, who has played a pivotal role in the PGA/directors' guilds' greening film and film storytelling initiatives. Pilcher will share what she has explored and built, what she has learned from efforts at other universities, and what terrain remains ahead. The conversation is intended to be practical and reciprocal: what might climate-integrated, arts-engaged teaching look like at Stanford, and what would it take to make it durable?
Workshop with Beatrice Glow
May 11 (time tbd)
artsCatalyst lead: Kim Beil
Fellows join visiting artist Beatrice Glow for a workshop in conversation with Glow’s mini-residency and the Rumsey Map Center. Beatrice Glow makes work about the colonial spice trade, often focusing on the impacts of Dutch trade in the 17th century on Indonesia and on what is now New York. She works in colonial archives—and maps figure centrally in this—as well as with Native culture bearers in both locations. At Rumsey she’ll be pursuing new research on Taiwan, where her family is from.
This fellowship is administered by the Stanford Arts Institute (SAI) with support from the Office of the Vice President for the Arts.Â
Contact:
Stanford Arts Institute
artsinstitute@stanford.edu
