Arts Initiative Staff

  • Mark Clague

    Interim Executive Director

  • Clare Croft

    Director of Arts Research / Creative Practice

  • Christopher Audain

    Managing Director

  • Alison Rivett

    Associate Managing Director

  • Joe Levickas

    Program Director

  • Jessica Jenks

    Communications Strategist 

  • Kathryn Grabowski-Khairullah

    Program Curator

  • Adrienne Frank

    Program Specialist

  • Erin Flores

    Project/Administrative Coordinator

  • Kesiena Wanogho

    Engagement Coordinator

Arts Initiative Executive Committee

Co-Chairs

Members

Support the Arts Initiative

Your gift to the U-M Arts Initiative will expand access to the arts on campus and beyond, activate them in student learning and integrate the arts into research across disciplines. Your support for the Arts Initiative will strengthen the arts ecosystem of southeast Michigan while also shaping national and global understandings of how the arts can lead social change.

Make a Gift

Pathways and Projects

  • Advocating for the arts as a modality for addressing the most pressing problems of our day.
  • Changing the culture at the U-M by centering the arts in teaching and learning, research, and community engagement.
  • Promoting the state of Michigan's contributions to arts and culture widely, and illustrate its centrality to our national artistic landscape.
  • Supporting arts-centered research and creative work that advances the mission of the university.
  • Elevating racial equity and social justice in all of our work.
  • Integrating arts production, reception, and experiences with the arts more fully and broadly into the undergraduate curriculum.
  • Creating interdisciplinary spaces for collaboration and community-building.
  • Acting as a leading advocate for the power of the arts regionally, nationally, and globally.

Featured Projects

"Arts & Resistance" Theme Semester

In a cross-campus partnership between the U-M Museum of Art, the U-M Arts Initiative, and the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, this campus theme semester will reflect on how creativity and making can arise out of oppression and destruction.

Culture Corps

Culture Corps will be a cohort of undergraduate students who take a mini-course together and then are placed in paid internships at arts and culture organizations in Southeast Michigan.

Michigan Monuments

The Michigan Monuments Project, in partnership between the University of Michigan Museum of Art, will examine how history gets made and remade through public art, and it will leverage public artistic practice as a catalyst for imagining a more just future for the State of Michigan.