With Matthew Shenoda

In this course, we will begin by examining how race is constructed, systematized, codified, commodified, and disseminated across various spaces in society through the study of several key scholarly and theoretical works. We will then use that lens to explore how different artists from multiple disciplines (poetry, visual art, music, and performance) have engaged issues of race in their work to both affirm individual and collective racial identities and trouble the ways those identities have been represented and understood. Each student will create creative or critical works reflecting their own intersections with these topics.

With Holly Shaffer and Shahzia Sikander

This course thinks across the arts with the remarkable artist Shahzia Sikander. Over three decades, Sikander has produced compelling objects that practically and theoretically transcend borders and probe contested histories. Sikander is internationally renowned for a pioneering, multi-media practice that takes classical Indo-Persian miniature painting as its point of departure, and inflects it with contemporary South Asian, American, Feminist, and Muslim perspectives. Sikander’s work stands in opposition to the idea of homogenous and authentic national cultures; instead, Sikander asks that we understand terms such as “tradition,” “culture” and “identity” as unstable, abstract, and constantly evolving. This course considers different aspects of Sikander’s practice, from her training in Indo-Persian painting to her work with poets, dancers, and composers. We’ll engage closely with South Asian paintings, and a range of texts, including works by Aruna D’Souza, Gayatri Gopinath, and Saidiya Hartman.

With Nadine Lee

The history of black music is a rich and diverse tapestry, spanning centuries and continents.
In this course, students will explore the history of black music through a variety of lenses, including its social and cultural context, its technical and stylistic innovations, and its impact on contemporary music. Students will also have the opportunity to develop their ensemble instrumental skills through workshops and performance opportunities.

With Kate Burton

“Acting for the Camera” curriculum is divided into three parts depending on experience: 1. Auditioning for the Camera, 2. Acting for the Camera, 3. Playing the Villain on Camera. Part 2, “Acting,” will be our focus: Multiple scripts, including episodes of “Homeland,” “Mad Men,” and “Ted Lasso” will be part of the curriculum in addition to scripts from the following genres: comedies, drama, single and multi-camera TV (sitcoms), superhero franchises, horror, etc. This work should complement and enhance previous acting studies and help you move to an understanding of the nuanced shift actors need to make when they are acting for the camera. Kate Burton teaches ARTS 1006, "Playing the Villain on Camera," and TAPS 1500R, "Auditioning for the Camera." These courses (and any camera courses taught by Richard Waterhouse in TAPS) provide a foundation for studying camera acting.

With Avery Willis Hoffman

Introduce students to the principles, techniques, and skills essential to becoming an effective member of the professional arts workforce and to ArtsCrew, an innovative employment service in development here at Brown which will offer access to workforce development opportunities and paid on-campus and community-based project work in a variety of artistic disciplines. Students will be engaged in researching cultural worker employment models, as well as shaping, regularly assessing, and improving the student component of ArtsCrew. In addition to class time, each student will be assigned to an appropriate artistic project on campus across the course of the semester. A total of 180 logged hours, including class time, research assignments, and project work, will be required to pass the class and to enter ArtsCrew as a member eligible for paid work.

With Kym Moore

This course centers the role of design for performance in the creation of an original Immersive Performance Installation titled Do Eye Know? devised by Kym Moore and Antigravity Performance Project. DEKY is an AfroFuturist examination of the ways in which Race and Religion have been used as effective methods of social control. It asks us to SEE between the lines of rhetoric, policy, and perception that serve to divide and conquer us all. Can we find refuge, healing, and sustenance in the human dimension? Guided by the work of Octavia Butler, bell hooks, and Rasheedah Phillips, students will explore theories of Black Quantum Futurism as Method. Applying these principles to devise the material language necessary to tell the story. Students interested in Visual Art (Collage), Film, Interactive Digital Media, Sound, Scenic, Lighting, Projection, and Costume design are encouraged to apply.

With Alexander Weheliye

This course will look at the relationship between Blackness and different concepts of life to highlight how Black life functions as a constitutive ontological limit for the workings of modern humanity. To that end, we will study texts from such recent fields as new materialism, animal studies, disability studies, and affect theory in tandem with writings from a variety of Black Studies approaches in order to ascertain how they might fruitfully speak to each other. We will pay particular attention to the complex ways gender and sexuality function in the barring of Black flesh from the category of the human-as-Man, while also providing the conditions of possibility for alternate ways of inhabiting the world.

With Jayna Brown

This course examines science fiction literature, film, and other media through the rubric of science studies, with three overlapping areas of exploration: biology, technology, and technologies of race, as well as broader planetary ecologies. Though the focus of the course will be fiction, film, and media, we will use theories coming out of queer studies, Africana studies, media studies, and science fiction studies to analyze the course materials.

With Macarena Gómez-Barris

This seminar explores the politics of color in the work of artists, writers, and thinkers who create or engage images in ways that challenge us to see color as neither arbitrary nor neutral, but instead as portals that allow us access to powerful social and cultural dynamics. Our emphasis will be on the resonances of dark color, specifically the varying intensities of blacks, browns, blues, and violets. We will consider their extended manifestation in shadow, night and negative space, blind fields, color adjustments. This is an inter-institutional seminar taught jointly at Brown University and Princeton, as part of a collaboration between the Brown Arts Institute and Princeton Collaboratorium for Radical Aesthetics. The seminar will meet in person at Brown and Princeton with joint virtually linked session. The seminar will require at least one but no more than two joint sessions

With Laura Colella

This intensive script development and directing workshop is designed for students who have some proficiency in screenwriting, and little to no directing experience. Basic shooting and editing skills are helpful, or will be learned in the first half of the semester. The course aims to serve as a two-way bridge, opening screenwriting students up to the possibility of directing their work, while also investigating how acting and directing experiences, and workshopping material with actors, can inform future screenwriting. Activities include learning acting and directing techniques, scene analysis, writing and revising scenes, casting and working with actors, creating a scene through improvisation, and filming practice versions of scenes. Guests will join us for workshops and final reviews.

With Helina Metaferia

This interdisciplinary course explores theoretical and practical ways that art can engage community. We will explore methods for social interventions, collaboration, and the notion of art as activism. Part studio and part seminar, this course examines our role in society as cultural producers. Students will engage in a series of readings and assignments that will help them prepare for a self-directed, socially engaged project of their choosing. They may work in any artistic medium and in communities of their choice. Students will work outside of class on their projects and present documentation of its development for class critique.

With Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo

Black Feminist Sonic Praxes is a graduate-level sound studies discussion/production seminar that explores a range of sound-based methodologies that reflect and inform Black feminisms, from the early 20th century to the contemporary moment, with a particular focus on the sonic practices devised, examined, and espoused by black women, girls, trans* and non-binary folks based in the U.S. Students will critically engage with the creative and scholarly contributions of theorists, historians, artists, and/or other sound workers like Zora Neale Hurston, Moor Mother, and DJ Lynnée Denise to examine how we might use sound-based methodologies to attend to Black feminist and womanist notions of knowledge production, pleasure, care, wonder, and dis/respectability. The source material includes a mix of popular and academic texts, drawing from black studies, sound studies, gender and sexuality studies, and ethnomusicology among other fields of study.

With Avery Willis Hoffman and Eric Gershman

Arts Leadership is an undergraduate course introducing students to the building blocks of effective arts leadership, management, and succession planning with a focus on building practical skills while reflecting on the future of arts leadership. This course is intended for students currently acting in a leadership role for a student arts organization and encourages students to use upcoming group events and programs as the basis for assignments and final projects. Students planning to step into leadership roles may participate in the course with a current leader to develop organizational structure and succession plans.

This class will explore playing the villain on camera. We will focus on three archetypes of the villain as outlined in USC Professor Joe Hacker’s seminal work “Auditioning for the Camera”: 1. The psychopathic individual. 2. Those driven by an inclination to create chaos, and 3.Those who get caught up in an illicit scheme to get something (money, power, revenge, love). Each of these archetypes will be explored in class, then filmed, and will be delivered to each student. Your professor is a working professional film, television, and theater actor, and students will additionally explore the “first day of shooting” using these villain pieces: you will be guided through the process of filming these pieces in a professional setting.

With Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born

Looking at performance as an act of transmission rather than a transaction or production, this class will consider the differing ways we relate to other bodies moving through space. Students will be guided through the process by which Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born create performance work. Utilizing writing exercises, song making practices, and structured/improvisational movement as research tools into what our bodies may carry from ancestors we no longer locate on a map or in a history book. Reading the writings of other practitioners whose work expresses foundational tenets of Okwui and Peter’s practice will be discussed alongside active movement exercises. With a focus on collaboration and engagement, we will investigate how performance can be a way of practicing new relations to one another. The course will culminate with students creating and performing their own projects with class participation.

With Avery Willis Hoffman / Jessica Wasilewski / Marc Warren / Kate Kraczon

Introduce students to the principles, techniques, and skills essential to becoming an effective member of the professional arts workforce and to ArtsCrew, an innovative employment service in development here at Brown which will offer access to workforce development opportunities and paid on-campus and community-based project work in a variety of artistic disciplines. Students will be engaged in researching cultural worker employment models, as well as shaping, regularly assessing, and improving the student component of ArtsCrew. In addition to class time, each student will be assigned to an appropriate artistic project on campus across the course of the semester. A total of 180 logged hours, including class time, research assignments, and project work, will be required to pass the class and to enter ArtsCrew as a member eligible for paid work.

With Sophia LaCava Bohanan

Students in Artist@Work: Arts Education will work closely with teaching artists Cassidy Jones and Drew Petersen to develop arts curriculum for Carrie Mae Weems: Varying Shades of Brown, a campus-wide artistic intervention including exhibitions, performances, and a gathering during the Fall 2023 semester. Students will garner insights on the processes and practices of being a teaching artist while gaining first hand experience contributing to the development of Brown Arts Institute’s public programs. This course is best suited for students interested in education, arts curriculum, public programming and/or considering a career as a Teaching Artist.

With Macarena Gomez-Barris / Bathsheba R Demuth

Structured around critical “elements” in the contemporary relationship between people and the environments they inhabit—from water and carbon to forests and phosphorus—this course offers a tour through debates and conversations about environmental politics, knowledge production, and action. Through readings in decolonial, Black and Indigenous theory; fiction; films; and visits from scholars and practitioners, the goal of the class is to offer students fresh methods for understanding the origins of environmental inequalities based on racial, gendered and other forms of hierarchical thinking; how communities have and are living otherwise; and ways to imagine the kinds of social and ecological worlds we hope to build. Individual and group writing and other creative work are integral to this senior capstone course.

With Laura Colella / John Eisendrath / Jennifer Levin

Screenwriting for feature-length and episodic works. Participants should already have experience writing short screenplays and be prepared to develop a longer piece. See the Literary Arts Department website for course entry procedures for all advanced workshops. Work sample and instructor permission required. S/NC.

This intensive production course is designed for students who have some proficiency in screenwriting or poetry and little to no filmmaking experience. The course aims to serve as a two-way bridge, opening screenwriting and poetry students up to the possibility of making films, while also investigating how production experiences can inform future writing projects. We will experiment with a variety of filmmaking techniques and tools to investigate the symbiotic relationships between writing and visual language. The equal importance of sound in the film viewing experience will also be explored, with students learning techniques for recording and editing multitrack soundtracks. Guest filmmakers will join us and respond to student work.

This course serves as an introduction to critical theories of race, gender, and sexuality across selected sites in the African diaspora and on the African continent. We will begin the semester with some broad theoretical considerations about Black queer and trans lives and then we will discuss critical writings and analyze literary texts, films, and musical practices about Black queerness and transness in order to understand the complex ways Blackness and shapes marginalized genders and sexualities across the globe.

With Alexander Weheliye

This course provides an introduction to the history of black popular music since the1970s, focusing primarily on sound cultures from the US, Caribbean, and Western Europe. We will begin by studying the mixing techniques developed in Reggae (dub), Disco (remix), and Hip-Hop (scratching and sampling) to discuss how they have shaped popular music since the1970s. We will then survey these genres as well as the histories of R&B, House and Techno and some of their many offshoots (Jungle & Afrobeats, for instance) have developed over the last 30 years to ask how popular music functions as one of the main channels of communication among the cultures of the African diaspora. Overall, this course investigates the aesthetic, political, cultural, and economic dimensions of black popular music, paying particular attention to questions of gender, sexuality, class, nation, language, and technology.

With Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo

This is an introductory production seminar in which students will explore various aspects of rap songwriting and performance. Over the course of the semester we will examine a range of poetic constructs, song structures, and storytelling approaches through deep listening sessions, class discussions, and lectures from invited guests. Creative assignments will be paired with materials that contextualize our work within the broader history of hip hop as a black cultural expression and locate certain songwriting trends within ongoing musico-cultural dialogues about authorship, race, gender, sexuality, and genre, among other topics.
In lieu of a formal lab, there will be a minimum of four workshops per semester to provide a basic studio foundation for students without prior recording experience and a space for more advanced students to practice and share. Planning of these workshops will consider the group of enrolled students' schedules.

With Kate Burton

This course focuses on learning to audition for scenes and scripts from film and television from the vast array of the entertainment industry. Work will cater to each student’s individual needs, choosing material that both strengthens and stretches them. We will work on preparing scenes for an audition: in person, on zoom, self-tapes and cold auditions. We will discuss over-preparing and under-preparing and how to dress and present yourself. This work should complement and enhance previous acting studies and help you with an understanding about the nuanced shifts actors need to make when auditioning for the camera, and the difference between auditioning and playing the role. Your professor is a working actor who will provide examples of what she is teaching in real time. The semester will culminate with 3 audition pieces from both media filmed for your use. S/NC

With Shirine Saad

In this course we will develop our critical skills and find our unique voice for multimedia arts criticism and storytelling rooted in a collective pursuit of liberation. We will study both contemporary arts journalism and cultural theory to assess the urgent needs and issues in the arts and society at large, with an intersectional lens - and address them accordingly. 

We will be doing a good deal of reading, watching, listening, interviewing, writing, recording, and collaborating, and exploring regional cultural spaces. This is where all your skills come in: photography, graphic design, web building, podcasting, playlisting, filming, interviewing, and of course writing. We will create a multimedia project documenting the artists we engage with. 

By the end of this course you will be skilled at engaging critically with contemporary cultural production, researching for shorter multimedia articles, preparing and conducting interviews with artists, sourcing media content, fact checking, and building a collaborative multimedia arts project. Through this process we will reimagine an inclusive, radical practice in culture, one that bridges the classroom and the world.

With Matthew Shenoda

In this course, we will begin by examining how race is constructed, systematized, codified, commodified, and disseminated across various spaces in society through the study of several key scholarly and theoretical works. We will then use that lens to explore how different artists from multiple disciplines (poetry, visual art, music, and performance) have engaged issues of race in their work to both affirm individual and collective racial identities and trouble the ways those identities have been represented and understood. Each student will create creative or critical works reflecting their own intersections with these topics.

With Murielle Borst Tarrant

This course examines Native American theatre from origins of traditional storytelling to politics of race involved in Native theatre today and is best suited for students exploring how to become theatre makers. First, we examine traditional storytelling from creation stories in literature and theatre. Second, we study interactions with Europeans with the Doctrine of Discovery, Native American boarding schools systems, outlawing of traditional culture and how Native culture survived in these systems in wild west shows, sideshows and snake oil shows. Topics will be explored through a Native lens via movies, commercials, television and will examine the theatre movement that responded. Finally, students will directly engage with course content through weekly embodied practice. The weekly course structure will include one class meeting focused on seminar/lecture/discussion, with the second meeting focused on writing and movement based in Spiderwoman methodology.

With Avery Willis Hoffman / Jessica Wasilewski / Marc Warren / Kate Kraczon / Sophia LaCava-Bohanan

Introduce students to the principles, techniques, and skills essential to becoming an effective member of the professional arts workforce and to ArtsCrew, an innovative employment service in development here at Brown which will offer access to workforce development opportunities and paid on-campus and community-based project work in a variety of artistic disciplines. Students will be engaged in researching cultural worker employment models, as well as shaping, regularly assessing, and improving the student component of ArtsCrew. In addition to class time, each student will be assigned to an appropriate artistic project on campus across the course of the semester. A total of 180 logged hours, including class time, research assignments, and project work, will be required to pass the class and to enter ArtsCrew as a member eligible for paid work.

With Avery Willis Hoffman and Carrie Mae Weems

Students who engage with the arts through Artist@Work courses learn through direct encounter the many and varied research and development processes artists use to advance their thinking, enactment, and refinement of in-progress works. As the students accompany the artist moving toward the goal of professional presentation, exhibition, and performance, they enjoy experiencing the real-world considerations, complexities, technicalities, and activities inherent in making large-scale and professionally-produced art works. Through this exposure, and their direct apprenticeship with working artists, students receive the opportunity for lifelong connection and real-world experience.

With Alexander Weheliye

As part of an inter-institutional collaboration with the Princeton Collaboratorium for Radical Aesthetics at the Lewis Center for the Arts (LCA) and the Brown Arts Initiative, the proposed graduate seminar will be team-taught by Tina Campt (Art and Archeology/LCA) and Alexander Weheliye (Modern Culture and Media/BAI). The course engages the idea of frequency as a conceptual framework in a range of fields including sound and media studies, Black studies and critical theory, studies of the Anthropocene and social ecology, art history and criticism, and among contemporary artists working in multiple media. Joint in-person sessions of the seminar will be structured around conversations with guest artists and scholars who will present their work at public events and seminar meetings at the host institution.

With Tracie Morris

In this course, we’ll consider how language, poetics, text, identity and performance generate new perspectives of understanding and creating art. We will consider connections and divergences through a sample of innovative approaches to art making, concepts and experiences. We will utilize both poetry and performance theory, especially Speech Act Theory, to frame ideas of Intertextuality and Interconnectivity in the arts.

With Macarena Gómez-Barris

In this course we explore the capitalist and consumer climate emergency by attending to local and planetary disasters, and ask if this emergency is the inevitable outcome of the Western onto-epistemic regime. We center Black, Indigenous, and Global South creative modes of living, being, and doing. We define racial ecologies as constituted out of a global structure of colonial power that includes slavery, extraction, debt, settler colonialism, carcerality, and hierarchies of race/gender/sex. Yet, racial ecologies also de-link from this condition through collaborative and autonomous practices and through new/old imaginaries of survivance. Our approach to the collaborative humanities exceeds the logics of anthropocentric containment by focusing on radical, black feminist, and queer decolonial projects that destabilize dominant understandings of the human and non-human. Case studies, literary texts, visual arts, experience, installation, sound, media, and performance are important nodes of our discussion.

With Laura Colella

This intensive script development and directing workshop is designed for students who have some proficiency in screenwriting, and little to no directing experience. Basic shooting and editing skills are helpful, or will be learned in the first half of the semester. The course aims to serve as a two-way bridge, opening screenwriting students up to the possibility of directing their work, while also investigating how acting and directing experiences, and workshopping material with actors, can inform future screenwriting. Activities include learning acting and directing techniques, scene analysis, writing and revising scenes, casting and working with actors, creating a scene through improvisation, and filming practice versions of scenes. Guests will join us for workshops and final reviews.

With Alexander Weheliye

This course serves as an introduction to critical theories of race, gender, and sexuality across selected sites in the African diaspora and on the African continent. We will begin the semester with some broad theoretical considerations about Black queer and trans lives and then we will discuss critical writings and analyze literary texts, films, and musical practices about Black queerness and transness in order to understand the complex ways Blackness and shapes marginalized genders and sexualities across the globe.

Black Feminist Sonic Practices is a graduate-level sound studies discussion/production seminar that explores a range of sound-based methodologies that reflect and inform Black feminisms, from the early 20th century to the contemporary moment, with a particular focus on the sonic practices devised, examined, and espoused by black women, girls, trans* and non-binary folks based in the U.S. Over the course of the semester students will critically engage with the creative and scholarly contributions of theorists, historians, artists, and/or other sound workers like Zora Neale Hurston, Moor Mother, and DJ Lynnée Denise to examine how we might use sound-based methodologies to attend to Black feminist and womanist notions of knowledge production, pleasure, care, wonder, and dis/respectability. The source material includes a mix of popular and academic texts, drawing from black studies, sound studies, gender and sexuality studies, and ethnomusicology among other disciplines.

With Shirine Saad
In this course we will develop our critical skills and find our unique voice for multimedia arts criticism and storytelling rooted in a collective pursuit of liberation. We will study both contemporary arts journalism and cultural theory to assess the urgent needs and issues in the arts and society at large, and address them accordingly. We will be doing a good deal of reading, watching, listening, interviewing, writing, recording, and collaborating. This is where all your skills come in: photography, graphic design, web building, podcasting, playlisting, filming, interviewing, and of course writing. We will create a multimedia project documenting our work, and that of the artists we engage with. Through this process we will reimagine an inclusive, radical practice in culture, one that bridges the classroom and the world.

With Shirine Saad
In this course, we will make space for constructive, community-led conversations about art -- and responses through thoughtful writing. How do we map out the conditions of art making? Who gets to impact culture, how, and why? How do we craft responses to art that move culture forward? And how does this writing benefit our lives, and communities? We will hone our cultural criticism skills in a series of workshops that will result in the making of a multimedia zine. This safe, collaborative space will help us reimagine the ways in which art connects us to those around us - and ignite new dynamics of care. This class is open to community members, for whom readings are not mandatory, and who can participate in producing the zine in any capacity.

With Avery Willis Hoffman
Arts Leadership is an undergraduate course introducing students to the building blocks of effective arts leadership, management, and succession planning with a focus on building practical skills while reflecting on the future of arts leadership. This course is intended for students currently acting in a leadership role for a student arts organization and encourages students to use upcoming group events and programs as the basis for assignments and final projects. Students planning to step into leadership roles may participate in the course with a current leader to develop organizational structure and succession plans.

With Laura Colella
This intensive production course is designed for students who have some proficiency in screenwriting or poetry and little to no filmmaking experience. The course aims to serve as a two-way bridge, opening screenwriting and poetry students up to the possibility of making films, while also investigating how production experiences can inform future writing projects. We will experiment with a variety of filmmaking techniques and tools to investigate the symbiotic relationships between writing and visual language. The equal importance of sound in the film viewing experience will also be explored, with students learning techniques for recording and editing multitrack soundtracks. Guest filmmakers will join us and respond to student work.

With Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo
This is an introductory songwriting seminar in which students will explore various aspects of rap songwriting as lyricists and performers. Over the course of the semester we will examine a range of poetic constructs, song structures, and storytelling approaches through deep listening sessions, class discussions, and lectures from invited guests. Students will be expected to record verses or parts of verses as part of their weekly writing assignments as well as workshop prepared material with their classmates at three points during the semester.

With Avery Willis Hoffman
Students who engage with the arts through Artist@Work courses learn through direct encounter the many and varied research and development processes artists use to advance their thinking, enactment, and refinement of in-progress works. As the students accompany the artist moving toward the goal of professional presentation, exhibition, and performance, they enjoy experiencing the real-world considerations, complexities, technicalities, and activities inherent in making large-scale and professionally-produced art works. Through this exposure, and their direct apprenticeship with working artists, students receive the opportunity for lifelong connection and real-world experience. Additional information can be found here.

Since COVID-19, enforcement of “social distancing” has become a state mandate. The resultant choreographies of “social distancing” have catalyzed a confluence of gestures, disciplining technologies, discriminatory health practices, and state power; a braid of urgent concern for scholars and artists, and the subject of this interdisciplinary arts workshop. Offered by Brown Arts Initiative, the workshop is open to graduate students, undergraduate students, and faculty by application. Full course credit is available for those interested. Participants will consider their respective creative practices in light of COVID-19 and emerging systems of computational recognition, broader trends with technologies of the body, and surveillance. Taught by Sydney Skybetter.

In this course we will develop our critical skills and find our unique voice for multimedia arts criticism and storytelling rooted in a collective pursuit of liberation. We will study both contemporary arts journalism and cultural theory to assess the urgent needs and issues in the arts and society at large, and address them accordingly. We will be doing a good deal of reading, watching, listening, interviewing, writing, recording, and collaborating. This is where all your skills come in: photography, graphic design, web building, podcasting, playlisting, filming, interviewing, and of course writing. We will create a multimedia project documenting our work, and that of the artists we engage with. Through this process we will reimagine an inclusive, radical practice in culture, one that bridges the classroom and the world. Taught by Shirine Saad.

In this course, we will make space for constructive, community-led conversations about art -- and responses through thoughtful writing. How do we map out the conditions of art making? Who gets to impact culture, how, and why? How do we craft responses to art that move culture forward? And how does this writing benefit our lives, and communities? We will hone our cultural criticism skills in a series of workshops that will result in the making of a multimedia zine. This safe, collaborative space will help us reimagine the ways in which art connects us to those around us - and ignite new dynamics of care. This class is open to community members, for whom readings are not mandatory, and who can participate in producing the zine in any capacity. Taught by Shirine Saad.

Arts Leadership is an undergraduate course introducing students to the building blocks of effective arts leadership, management, and succession planning with a focus on building practical skills while reflecting on the future of arts leadership. This course is intended for students currently acting in a leadership role for a student organization and encourages students to use upcoming group events and programs as the basis for assignments and final projects. Students planning to step into student group leadership roles may participate in the course with a current leader to develop succession plans. Instructor permission required. Taught by Thalia Field.

This class will examine the many ways that movies come together as well as the myriad ways in which they can be pulled apart and put back together by different audiences. Movie-making requires desire, collaboration, improvisation, money, time, and imagination. Sometimes, all it requires is “being there” and a cell phone. Much of what filmmaking demands is hidden in what is seen on screen, but the more we understand about the languages of cinema, the more it's possible to see. Using cinematic history, personal history, and political history as lenses, the class will think together in expansive ways about ethics, process, notions of self, and terms. The class will watch and discuss the films of makers from around the world and across time. Taught by Kirsten Johnson.

The course will be an experimental studio, mixing theory and practice, to formulate a position beyond what’s known in Europe as “post-dramatic theater.” We will oscillate between discussion, assignments and practical studio work, learning from others and making our own work. The foundation will be addressing artists, writers and pop phenomena internationally with an emphasis on Europe and Israel. Building on these, the practical aspect will comprise of physical group work and home assignments. In learning to compose entanglements between image, sound, word, and space, we will sharpen our tools for reimagining the contemporary performative condition. In the final stage of the course, students will create their own performative études. Instructor permission required. Taught by Ariel Ashbel.

This course examines Native American Theatre from origins of traditional storytelling to politics of race involved in Native theatre today. First, we will examine traditional storytelling from creation stories in literature and theatre. Second, we will study interactions with Europeans with the Doctrine of Discovery, Native American boarding schools systems, outlawing of traditional culture and how Native culture survived in these systems. These topics will be explored through Native literature and Native plays. Next, the course considers how the public, and the media, support the distortions of Native images. Finally, the course concludes by examining the modern era of Native Theatre and the Declaration of the Rights on Indigenous Peoples. Instructor permission required. Taught by Muriel Borst.

Combining art making with the close reading of scholarly texts and media objects, this course engages with the categories of ‘reproduction’ and ‘reproductive labor’ as complex and contradictory sites of activist and aesthetic involvement. We explore 20th and early 21st century traditions of feminist, queer and anti-colonial activism and aesthetics for what they teach us about the uneasy status of the ‘social’ and its reproduction as a semi-autonomous realm. How might we represent the realm of reproduction and reproductive labor when it is at once culturally devalued and obscured even as its representatives are idealized (or vilified) in highly classed, raced and gendered terms—as selfless mothers, prostitutes, mammies, 'essential workers,' etc.? Such questions demand a variety of approaches and students may choose to engage the course primarily through written assignments, artistic projects or a combination of both. Taught by Arlen Austen

In this course, we will divide our time equally between studying the works/styles of contemporary performance artists and practicing performance art techniques and various modes of physically engaging in this art form. (Note: Performance art is not to be confused with the term performing arts. This class is not a theater or poetry presentation course, but can be applied to the ways in which both are presented.) This course will focus on the genre of performance art which lies between most other art disciplines and includes raw feelings (not acted emotions), political views and above all else, the embodiment of physical actions as art. Taught by PoP Ayana Evans.

This course challenges artists, practitioners, and scholars to push the hermeneutic limits of archives. The course presents a series of critical essays, case studies, and workshops to support students as they develop theoretical expertise, creative thinking patterns, and practicable skills. Students will develop finding aids that support enhanced accessibility, and analyze systematic research practices that build toward equity. Ultimately they will develop acquisition plans in alignment with the Brown Libraries new acquisition plan.

Beginning with an overview of what constitutes an archive, this syllabus attempts to guide learners through the acquisitioning process. It foregrounds the ways that anti-racist activists and artists work in and against archives, exploring how collecting professionals and amateurs alike can use the acquisition process to challenge dominant white supremacist narratives and hierarchies of knowledge in the service of more equitable and just institutional development. Taught by Micah Salkind, Jazzmen Lee-Johnson and Tiffini Bowers.

ARTS 1310 Making the 21st Century Musical
Erin McKeown, BAI Professor of the Practice, Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies

Songs are a powerful dramatic storytelling tool - we see them used all the time in media, alongside scripted dialogue and visual elements. In this class we will explore contemporary musicals, in all forms, and we will create songs that tell stories. Together we will investigate how dramatic songs are made, what they can be about, and who are our audiences. We will pay special attention to perspectives that have been left out of past musical storytelling, and we will discover ways that our songs can advocate for justice in the 21st century and beyond. Application required (email artsinitiative@brown.edu after Dec 1 for a link to the google application form).

ARTS 1010 Script to Screen
Laura Colella, Literary Arts

Script to Screen is an intensive production course designed for students with some proficiency in screenwriting and little to no directing or filmmaking experience. The course aims to serve as a two-way bridge, opening writing students up to possibilities for production, while also investigating how production experiences can inform future writing. Activities include shooting and editing video exercises, working with actors, and filming practice scenes. A local casting director will conduct a workshop and bring in actors for scene work. A highly acclaimed guest director will work with students over three classes, conducting an acting workshop and critiquing scene work.

ARTS1000 The Arts Workshop: I'm So Alone- Art of Surveilled Bodies Amidst a Global Epidemiological Cluster#@%$
Sydney Skybetter, Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies

Since COVID-19, enforcement of “social distancing” has become a state mandate. The resultant choreographies of “social distancing” have catalyzed a confluence of gestures, disciplining technologies, discriminatory health practices, and state power; a braid of urgent concern for scholars and artists, and the subject of this interdisciplinary arts workshop. Offered by Brown Arts Initiative, the workshop is open to graduate students, undergraduate students, and faculty by application. Full course credit is available for those interested. Participants will consider their respective creative practices in light of COVID-19 and emerging systems of computational recognition, broader trends with technologies of the body, and surveillance.

ARTS1620 Tell the Story: The Afro-Diasporic Experience Through Documentary Film
Yoruba Richen, Professor of the Practice with BAI and the Department of Africana Studies

Documentary films have grown into an influential art form that has influenced politics, culture, social movements and how we see the world. They are relied on to sort out fact from fiction in an increasingly complex world where the lines continue to blur. Through film screenings, lectures, readings, critical analysis and group discussions, the course examines the changing nature of the documentary as it relates to how films documenting the Black Experience are conceived, told and distributed in different mediums. We will also look at how these films have been influenced as much by technology and ethical, social, cultural and political movements, as it has by the individual choices of the filmmakers.

ARTS 1700 Introduction to iPhone/iPad Moviemaking Using 3-D and 360 VR Comparisons
Ted Bogosian, Cogut Center for the Humanities

Mobile Devices are democratizing movie-making by lowering barriers to entry, enabling students to become full-fledged members of the film industry virtually overnight. This pioneering course provides the basic tools for students to create and distribute no- and low-budget live-action motion pictures with professional production values utilizing only their personal smartphones. Students will acquire the skills to plan, capture and edit short motion pictures through hands-on instruction and experimentation with low-cost accessories, including selfie-sticks, lens adapters, directional microphones and iPhone apps like Filmic Pro, Vizzywig and iMovie. Limited to junior, senior and graduate students.