Office of the Vice President for the Arts

Burt McMurtry Arts Initiatives Fund

The Burt McMurtry Arts Initiatives Fund offers support to academic staff or faculty-initiated interdisciplinary projects that test new directions and possibilities in the arts at Stanford.

How to Apply

Applications Open on March 3, 2025 for the 2025-26 Cycle

Grant Recipients

2024-25

JENN BROPHY AND HELEN DANG | From Petri Dish to Palette: Exploring Bacterial-based Paint

Project Summary

This interdisciplinary project, spearheaded by Helen Dang (Science Program Manager, Bioengineering) and Jenn Brophy (Assistant Professor, Bioengineering), aims to showcase the potential of synthetic biology in the arts. By utilizing bioengineering techniques, the project seeks to transform bacteria into a bio-machine that produces fluorescent protein "pigment" for use in painting on cotton canvas. Through this endeavor, the project aims to raise awareness within the Stanford community about synthetic biology's role in the arts. This project will result in a workshop and gallery exhibition, inviting contemplation on synthetic biology, sustainability, and art materials.

Biography

Dr. Jennifer Brophy's lab develops technologies that enable the genetic engineering of plants and their associated microbes with the goal of driving innovation in agriculture for a sustainable future. The Brophy lab's work is focused in synthetic biology and the reprogramming of plant development for enhanced environmental stress tolerance.

Helen Dang is the Science Program Manager for the Stanford Department of Bioengineering. She earned her B.S. in Bioengineering from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Passionate about the intersection of science, art, and communication, Helen channels her creativity through her role as a science communicator and administrator, fostering community spaces around emerging synthetic biology and bioengineering initiatives at Stanford. She also practices as a ceramic artist and watercolor painter.

TAKAKO FUJIOKA | Improvisational Rap Art, Lyrics Database, and Rhyme-Rhythm Analysis

Project Summary

Rap music is popular worldwide and is practiced in various languages. Quantitative research on rap improvisation may hold an important key to understanding human cognitive processes of combining language rhymes and musical rhythms into the rap/hip-hop music style, and elucidating universally-shared and language-specific systems. However, it currently requires more freely available databases and tools to conduct such analyses, as commercially available rap music contains non-improvisational rap performance. At the same time, the Stanford campus has low visibility of rap/hip-hop music activities despite the popularity of the art form and its important connection to diversity in American society. Thus, the proposed project will combine the desire to pursue the scientific research goal of collecting and analyzing improvisational rap performance data and the desire to involve rap practices in students’ lives at Stanford and the surrounding local community. The whole project aims to organize three workshop+concert events featuring rap arts, collect audio recordings of improvisational rap performance in different languages for the database, and conduct quantitative analyses on rhyme and rhythm in rap to examine manners of music-language interactions. The project leader Takako Fujioka will work with Music graduate students and DJs and rappers in the Bay Area for this project and collaborate with Dr. Keith Cross (scholar, artist and educator, former Ph. D. student in Stanford Education, former U Hawaii professor) to continue rhyme and rhythm investigation.

Biography

Takako Fujioka grew up in Japan, playing music, hand-drawing comics, and making anime films. She earned a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Waseda University and a Ph.D. in Physiology from National Institute for Physiological Sciences. Then she moved to Toronto, Canada as a post-doctoral fellow supported by awards from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. In 2012, Takako opened her “Neuromusic” laboratory at Stanford University, in the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, equipped with EEG and 3D motion capture systems. The laboratory offers research opportunities to graduate and undergraduate students on various auditory perception and music cognition topics. Recent projects include neural correlates of temporal anticipation, expressive body movements, beat perception, joint improvisation, hip-hop rhyme processing, ensemble roles related to empathy, music perception for cochlear implant users, and music-supported neurorehabilitation. She serves as an Associate Editor in Frontier Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience, a research advisory council in the Academy of Neurologic Music Therapy, and a grant-committee member/reviewer/thesis examiner in Canada, the US, Australia, Asian and European countries. In her free time, Takako continues to play piano for chamber ensembles and jazz jamming.

A person in a long, dark coat leans against a white wall

LOCHLANN JAIN | An Apocrypha of Drowning

Project Summary

In Europe, drowning emerged as a notable form of accidental death in the mid-18th century. “Apparently drowned” bodies, teetering between life and death, presented objects of fear, revulsion, and fascination and the advocates faced intense religious and scientific resistance. In the complex project of making drowning into a public health issue that could be solved, the minting, awarding, and presenting of lifesaving medals took center stage: saving someone from drowning would become a heroic act. The medals were expensive to mint, and their aim was to induce lifesaving action while also seducing the middle and upper classes to the value the cause; the Society; and not incidentally, the very project of the new Enlightenment science.

I have designed and cast in silver five medals that investigate the paradoxes I have unearthed in my scholarly research on drowning. I have spent this year building dioramas related to the questions raised by medal-making as a social ritual and to display and configure the source materials used in their design. The next phase of the project will involve photographing, editing, printing, and mounting of this work for the final show.

Biography

Professor Lochlann Jain is a professional medical anthropologist and artist. Jain has studied American law and medicine in three books and multiple articles. Jain’s artwork strives to strike a balance: just short of humor but close enough to the bone to provoke a jolt of recognition and a new way of thinking. Jain’s work has won multiple awards and been supported by Guggenheim, NEH, NSF, Wenner Gren and other grants. Jain has presented art in Berlin, Denver, North Carolina, New York, London, and on Stanford’s campus and taught art workshops in London, University Chicago, and University of Hawaii.

2023-24

KATIE DIETER | Reimagining Black Diasporic Identity through the Arts

Project Summary

Through participation in the 7th Annual Rex Nettleford Arts Conference at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts (EMCVPA) in Kingston, Jamaica, African & African American Studies (AAAS) Creative Honors students engage with workshops, art exhibitions, and panel discussions concerning interdisciplinary arts in the Caribbean. The students will also participate in culturally immersive experiences in Kingston that showcase the country’s rich artistic traditions. Led by Dr. Katie Dieter, students explore meanings of Black diasporic identity in the Caribbean through a Black Studies lens. The culmination of the trip includes a collaborative panel between AAAS and EMCVPA titled “Re-imagining Black Diasporic Identity through the Arts” in the Winter quarter to showcase their experiences and share a digital archive of the trip with photography and/or other creative projects developed by the students.

SCOTT FENDORF | A Theatrical Inquiry into Environmental Justice Implications of California Wildfires

Project Summary

This project uses performing arts techniques to initiate a conversation and raise awareness about the environmental justice implications of California wildfires. We will work with local communities in Northern California to identify environmental justice problems caused by California wildfires for inmate firefighters and farm workers. Through collaboration with these communities, we will conduct theater workshops to create and perform a play at Stanford University that explores the personal experiences and stories of inmate firefighters and farm workers disproportionately impacted by California wildfires. This play will act as a catalyst for a series of conversations, talkbacks, and panels, including experts, local groups, and policymakers, to promote healthy discourse around the environmental justice implications of California wildfires. These approaches will help to create new directions for theater to address real-world problems such as environmental injustice, contributing to the discourse regarding the impact of the arts in future extreme environments caused by the climate crisis.

STEPHEN MURPHY-SHIGEMATSU| Grief and Culture

Project Summary

Grief as sorrow experienced after a loss is universal but is deeply affected by culture. Grief goes beyond what has happened to us and is connected to what we fear, what we love, and what we aspire toward. It is therefore intimately tied to not only specific incidents but also to the ongoing trauma that is part of systemic oppression and complicated by race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.

One way of addressing grief is to reimagine our relationship to power, accountability, and boundaries that are expressed differently cross-culturally. We are all impacted by systemic trauma that is perpetuated within our society through structural inequalities and expressed in our interpersonal relationships. Attending to our own grief in community context enables us to responsibly engage with others from a position of innate wholeness.

The arts are increasingly recognized as an integral source of healing that is sorely needed in a world ravaged by violence and disease. In this project, women of color artists will lead small group sessions in experiential learning and healing exercises through their particular art form. Our project responds to the need in the Stanford community for safe places of refuge for those grieving, especially those who feel marginalized from mainstream places. We anticipate the creation of a beloved community on campus.

KRISH SEETAH | Can Art Express Our Loss for Biodiversity?

Project Summary

This project integrates STEM and Arts, providing an opportunity for reflection for a broad section of our campus community. The bison's original range extended from Alaska south to the grasslands of Mexico and stretched from the Great Basin of Nevada to the Appalachian Mountains. A 3D printed skeleton will be mounted and handed over to the student body, equipped with a GPS tracker, with the aim that a (Big Blue) Bison will roam across campus!

This piece will encourage thought on sustainability and conservation, as well as the indigenous groups that depended on these animals in the past, and what the elimination of such pinnacle species mean for our society. Moreover, the piece asks: do we want to have phials of DNA and image files to be the legacy we leave of our natural world? With the launch of the new Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, this project responds to current activity around issues of sustainability that are now at the forefront of Stanford’s recent efforts.

2022-23

GIGI OTÁLVARO | Kinesthetic Delight: Playful Mindfulness in the Museums

Project Summary

Gigi Otálvaro, who leads LifeWorks, a program for integrative learning within Stanford Living Education, was awarded a grant for Kinesthetic Delight: Playful Mindfulness in the Museums, as part of their new initiative Art and Wellbeing Engagement (AWE). A contemplative community gathering at the Anderson Collection celebrating the power of art, mindfulness, and play, the event will highlight the essential role that art can play as a public health intervention to support mental health and wellbeing.

ROSE SALSEDA | El Centro: The Heart of Stanford’s Latinx Art Legacy

Project Summary

2021-22

ELIZABETH HADLY| Hearing the Anthropocene: A Synergy of Science and Music to Reveal Recent Human Impacts to Nature

Project Summary

MICHAEL RAU | The Future of Digital-Performance-Making: A Convening

Project Summary

This project to host a convening on performance-making that bridges the gap between artists and academics, focusing on interdisciplinary collaborations that point towards the future of theater-making. Stanford will host a three-day convening to bring together current industry professionals, artist and academics to think through the future. The convening will also be recorded and streamed onto the internet to allow for multiple avenues of engagement.

RICHARD MEYER | Anita Steckel: Feminist Art and Sexual Politics

Project Summary

Anita Steckel: The Feminist Art of Sexual Politics showcases the vibrant work of American feminist artist Anita Steckel (1930-2012) whose audacious art addresses issues of gender inequity, objectification, female desire, and racial injustice. Some 60 works spanning a period of nearly 50 years will be on display at the Stanford Art Gallery, thus making it the most far-reaching exhibition of the artist’s work to date.

2020-21

KIM BEIL | Talking in the Library: Conversations on Photobooks

Project Summary

LOCHLANN JAIN | The Lung is a Bird and Fish

Project Summary

JAMIE MELTZER | ChocolateHeads Dance and Documentary Film Workshop

Project Summary

BISSERA PENTCHEVA | En-chanted Images of Ste. Foy at Conques

Project Summary

2019-20

HIDEO MABUCHI | Intermateriality:Redox

Project Summary

DIANE FRANK | Dances in Conversation w/ Jim Campbell & the Architecture of the Anderson

Project Summary

This dance/music/art project, tentatively titled “Snap Sets & Continuous Forms 2.0” is a multi-layered site-specific performance project. The retrospective of works by light artist Jim Campbell, installed throughout the Anderson Collection, and the architecture of the museum building itself, will be the paired inspiration and platform for formal construction of the dance and music.

Due to COVID-19, the presentation of this project has been postponed. Frank hopes to resume planning for this component once the Anderson Collection is able to reopen.

YOUNG JEAN LEE | iPads and iPens for Playwriting

Project Summary

Young Jean Lee has been working as a professional playwright and director for the past sixteen years, and in 2018 became the first Asian-American female to have her play produced on Broadway. In her classes, students develop full-length plays, with an emphasis on learning how to create collaborative communities to support the further development of their plays after the class is over. Lee is utilizing grant funds to purchase iPads to facilitate real-time edits and annotations.

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Edi Dai

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edidai@stanford.edu

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Burt McMurtry Arts Initiatives Fund

The Burt McMurtry Arts Initiatives Fund offers support to academic staff or faculty-initiated interdisciplinary projects that test new directions and possibilities in the arts at Stanford.

Grant Recipients

2024-25

2023-24

2022-23

2021-22

2020-21

2019-20

Didn't find what you were looking for?

Edi Dai