On a warm summer afternoon, Adi Behar, a junior in the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design, sat contemplating the Rampant Unicorn statue outside the Michigan League. 

Thousands of students descended on Ingalls Mall on Central Campus on Aug. 27, 2025 for the annual Festifall, featuring a multitude of student organizations and vendors.

The University of Michigan will celebrate the beauty, wonder and delight of the arts across the entire university this fall during the inaugural Michigan Arts Festival.

The University of Michigan Arts Initiative has announced its winter 2025 recipients for the Arts Initiative Project Support grants, awarding funding to 11 faculty-led projects across the university.

The University of Michigan’s Symphony Band will embark on a 2025 State of the Arts: Symphony Band Tour, bringing the transformative power of music to communities across Michigan.

The University of Michigan’s Arts Initiative has announced the 2025 cohort of its Creative Careers Residency — a pioneering transitional program designed to support emerging creatives as they move from academic study into full-time, professional creative practice.

President Santa J. Ono has committed $5 million from central University of Michigan funding to further develop U-M’s public art collection over the next five years, in support of the university’s Vision 2034 goals.

The Arts Research: Incubation & Acceleration grant program has awarded a new round of funding to seven faculty-led research projects that range from the role of artists in disability culture to art generated by AI models trained on bird nests.

The Arts Research: Incubation & Acceleration grant program has awarded its second round of funding to seven arts-based research projects, led by teams representing nine schools across the University of Michigan campuses in Ann Arbor and Dearborn.

The ARIA program, a collaborative venture by the Office of the Vice President for Research and the Arts Initiative, awarded more than $300,000 in April to support innovative projects that emphasize the pursuit of new methodologies and interactions that can reshape the role art plays in academic inquiry and social discourse.

The Arts Research: Incubation & Acceleration grant program and the Creativity Lab research development program have awarded their first round of funding to support innovative projects that center the arts in research and creative practice.

ARIA and C-lab were formed and funded in a joint effort between the Office of the Vice President for Research and the Arts Initiative.