Mellon Residential Fellowship Program for Arts Practice and Scholarship

“The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the University of Chicago share a fundamental commitment to the advancement of the arts on campus as fundamental modes of inquiry, experience, and communication, and we are delighted to support the University in the creation of an innovative fellowship program that is based on this premise. We congratulate the inaugural class of fellows on their selection to the program, and thank them for their participation. We are all eager to see what unexpected and inspired work these new collaborations will generate, and the impact they will have on campus and well beyond."

—Mariët Westermann, Vice President, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

The Gray Center’s signature initiative is the Andrew Mellon Residential Fellowship for Arts Practice and Scholarship program, designed to foster intensive, experimental, and interdisciplinary collaborations between artists and scholars.  The program aims to enliven the intersection of academic theory and artistic practice, bringing artists to campus for groundbreaking collaborations with Chicago scholars and bringing scholars to campus for inventive collaborations with our arts faculty and practitioners. 

The fellowship program intends to:

• bring together scholarship and art making as a new forum for – and ideally, as a new form of – transdisciplinary collaboration.
• create a powerful new paradigm for the integration of the arts in the teaching and scholarship of a research university, making the University of Chicago a creative incubator where artists, performers, critics, curators, and scholars re-imagine the role of the arts as a form of inquiry and knowledge production.
• integrate the Visiting Fellows into the intellectual life of the University.
• afford an unprecedented opportunity and have a transformational effect on the work of all participants.

For more information: http://arts.uchicago.edu/about/mellonfellows.shtml