Artists-in-Residence

Through Southern Futures, CPA will commission artists to make new works on themes central to the initiative. In addition to receiving commissioning support, those artists will complete residences in Chapel Hill, through which they will partner with community members to co-create through restorative justice practices — a framework unique in the field of the performing arts. This framework will be designed and facilitated by Culture Mill, an arts laboratory based in Saxapahaw, North Carolina. The first artists to be commissioned in this way will include the collaborative ensemble of Marcella Murray, David Neumann, and Tei Blow from Advanced Beginner Group.

Southern Futures is a collaborative initiative of The College of Arts & Sciences, University Libraries, Carolina Performing Arts, and The Center for the Study of the American South. The larger initiative helps imagine, understand, and create regional transformation by focusing on humble listening, community engagement, and bringing the arts and humanities to the foreground. Southern Futures supports faculty, students, policymakers, and storytellers doing extraordinary work committed to a future where all southern communities can flourish.

“Our campus is wrestling with long-held beliefs and overturning assumptions that are shaking us to our core,” said Jacqueline Lawton, the new co-director of Southern Futures at UNC-Chapel Hill and associate professor of dramatic art. “Southern Futures works to disrupt stereotypes of the American South and create a bold, new, radically inclusive vision for who we are and who we can be. In doing so, we will be better equipped to face the truths of our past and the consequences of our actions and inactions, however painful, and bring about much-needed change for our future.”

The Creative Futures initiative features a series of multi-year artistic projects that engage artists, communities, faculty and students in co-creative partnerships. The four artists have assembled “triangular collaborations” that include partners from among UNC’s faculty who are engaged in community-based research as well as local partners in the community. These co-creative partnerships have led the Creative Futures artists toward identifying multi-year projects that will empower communities to express their creativity and channel relevant issues.

The artists made their first visits to UNC and CPA in fall 2018, and have continued to collaborate remotely and on site, working in partnership with Rothwell Mellon Program Director for Creative Futures Christopher Massenburg, who says the fellowship “intentionally fosters collaboration among different communities of knowledge and insight that don’t always have the opportunity to work together.”

CPA’s Mellon Foundation DisTIL Fellows collaborate with faculty in a department outside of their own area of expertise, providing them with the opportunity to gain new insights into the questions that they have been asking about their work and the world and, in return, inspire and inform artists’ artistic processes. At the same time, the DisTIL Fellow will bring the unique creativity and approach of the arts to the work of the faculty, helping push UNC faculty and students to look at their work with a new lens, and share their work with new audiences.

The DisTIL Fellowship extends over several semesters as a way to recognize that collaboration does not happen overnight. It requires many meetings and time to build the shared trust, respect, and vocabulary that can allow for artistic and intellectual exchanges to take place. DisTIL Fellows spend 2-3 years visiting campus, connecting with faculty, and sharing the results of their ideas and discussions with the wider community.