Category: MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts

Welcome to the monthly MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts program news blog! This is a regular avenue for the public to learn about the achievements and good work of our alumni, students, and faculty. ALUMNI Riva Weinstein (MFAIA-VT ’14) will present Walking in Circles of Art/Life/Nature, an 18-minute walking meditation on Saturday, April 19th, 2014. And… Continue reading News and Achievements-March 2014

  As a progressive educator & developing scholar of decolonization, I have been thinking about interdisciplinarity, decolonization and  “co-learning” a lot lately.  This semester brought new and consequential insights on all three that I’d like to share. As the semester began, I enthusiastically set forth to explore interdisciplinarity with our newly-formed Interdisciplinary Art Learning Community. … Continue reading Together We Go There: Emergent Co-Learning Beyond the Colonial*

Welcome to the monthly MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts program news blog! This is a regular avenue for the public to learn about the achievements and good work of our alumni, students, and faculty. Current Students & Alumni Christine Brubaker  (MFAIA-VT ’15) will present her paper “Quantifying the Subjective: Acting and the Visual Analogue Scale” at… Continue reading News and Achievements – February 2014

Welcome to the monthly MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts program news blog! This is a regular avenue for the public to learn about the achievements and good work of our alumni, students, and faculty. FACULTY Petra Kuppers (MFAIA-WA)is enjoying multiple artist residencies this Winter-Spring, including: Rancho Paradiso near Joshua Tree National Park, California; the Dansbyran Dance… Continue reading News and Achievements – January 2014

Welcome to the monthly MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts program news blog! This is a regular avenue for the public to learn about the achievements and good work of our alumni, students, and faculty.  ALUMNI: Jeffrey M. Donato (2012), illustrator and educator, was accepted for publication this year. His Tarot D: The Didactic Tarot, which was… Continue reading News and Achievements – December 2013

Welcome to the inaugural post of the monthly MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts Program News Blog! We are very excited to have a regular avenue for everyone to learn about the achievements and good work of our students, alumni, and faculty. Students and Alumni Laura Ball’s (MFAIA ‘12) collaborative arts and non-profit organization, UNED!TED, received a… Continue reading News and Achievements – November 2013

I recently witnessed the death of a close friend from an acute illness. In the weeks that led to his passing, with an unexpected particularity, I encountered a few extraordinary people adept at holding space for the emotions and needs of others, and many more who were not. Since those days, I’ve been considering the… Continue reading Holding Space for Transformational Learning

Goddard values the principles of liberatory education. Even if it is not directly stated in the educational philosophy, it is clear. We care about critical thinking, experimental learning, dialog and becoming lifetime learners who impact social change. We care about social justice. We understand that liberatory education is a practice of freedom…a practice that at… Continue reading Considering the Bigger Picture: Education as a Practice of Freedom

The following was delivered as a graduation speech on September 22, 2013 for the Fall 2013 semester commencement ceremony of the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts Program in Port Townsend, Washington: From 2000 to 2007, after studying dance and contemporary performance for many years, I became a practicing artist. I created solo and ensemble works, performed… Continue reading “Not Knowing (or everything you always already knew about grad school but were afraid to be)”

John Borstel, “Painting My Face: A Daily Practice” Residencies are an intense opportunity to immerse in graduate study away from many of the distractions of daily life.  Not only is the residency a time to set the groundwork for the semester’s work–writing your study plan and developing a relationship with your advisor and advising group–but… Continue reading Residency Highlights: Art Crawl, July 2013

As part of the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts (MFAIA) Vermont Fall 2013 curricular offerings, I am facilitating a group study, Critical Composition: Think, Make, Write. It’s inspired by the teaching and writing of my friend Anne West, whose book—Mapping: The Intelligence of Artistic Work—travels with me as both inspiration and teacher. As I’ve written before,… Continue reading Critical Composition: Think, Make, Write

A few blocks from where I now live, on a late summer afternoon, I stopped in my tracks and stared at the sidewalk for some time. I was an undergraduate art student, probably 19 years old, and particularly vexed by the opaque and impenetrable rationale of the art school curriculum I was enduring. Somehow, in… Continue reading Why I Teach at Goddard

Artistic Practice as/and Knowledge Production in an Age of Uncertainty: Some forty years ago, British visual anthropologist and social scientist Gregory Bateson suggested that the loss of aesthetic wisdom has brought humanity to the brink of unhoming ourselves on earth. “Mere purposive rationality unaided by such phenomena as art, religion, dream, and the like, is… Continue reading The Being of Human: Art, Ethics, and Engagement

Occasionally I have to convince people of writing’s importance within an artist’s practice. To my mind, the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts program’s (MFAIA) emphasis on developing strong writing skills—through the dialogue between students and advisors, as a documentary tool, and as a means of critical thinking—is a fundamental benefit of our curriculum. It serves to… Continue reading Writing and Art Making, a Dialogue

  Creative Weavings of Art: Goddard Student Brings Students and Graduates Together for New Arts Festival | originally published in Clockworks Spring/Summer 2013 issue by Jim Sable, Business Manager of Prismatic Productions, Inc. For 150 years, Goddard graduates have assimilated into the creative weavings of art across the world. With interdisciplinary art, numerous artistic fields… Continue reading Featured Student: John Ollom (MFAIA '14)