The Hopkins Center for the Arts and the Office of the Vice Provost For Research have awarded grants totaling $100,000 to nine projects submitted by faculty and students for the 2025-26 round of the Arts Integration Initiative.
The Arts Integration grants, funded by the Office of the Provost, aim to support arts-centric research, incubate interdisciplinary projects and advance faculty-student mentorship.
In addition to the grant program, the Arts Integration Initiative has expanded its efforts to strengthen and expand interdisciplinary collaboration across campus. The initiative organizes networking events and information sessions to connect faculty, students, and researchers interested in leveraging the arts in their work. By fostering these connections, the Hop aims to provide a platform for creative partnerships that push the boundaries of traditional academic disciplines.
“These projects reveal a remarkable breadth of themes, bringing the arts into dialogue with disciplines across campus and beyond,” says Mary Lou Aleskie, Howard Gilman ’44 Executive Director of the Hop. “The diversity of topics highlights how deeply the arts are embedded in the ways we explore, understand, and respond to the world.”
“In the five years since the initiative was launched, the creativity and interdisciplinary sweep of these projects have underscored the strength of Dartmouth’s model of scholarship, which fully embraces the liberal arts,” adds Vice Provost for Research Dean Madden.
Selected from a highly competitive pool of applications, the projects represent a wide spectrum of interdisciplinary, arts-integrative inquiry.
On the arts side, the funded projects span music, studio art, art history, film, architecture, digital art, theater, and craft studies, intersecting with fields such as Asian studies, engineering, psychology, anthropology, astronomy, computer science and AI, environmental studies and geology.
Collectively, the projects engage subjects rooted on campus—such as creating a virtual bridge between the Arts District and the Class of 1982 Engineering and Computer Science Center on the West End of campus—as well as in the Upper Valley, through local singing community groups, and across the globe, including research on Indigenous culture in China.
The Dartmouth Rose Window, by Nicola Camerlenghi, associate professor of art history, and Elizabeth Rice Mattison, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Academic Programming and Curator of European Art at the Hood Museum, combines geological, engineering and art historical analyses with digital modeling to revitalize a fragmented late-medieval, Italian rose window disassembled in 65 stone blocks owned by Dartmouth. “We are excited to share this hidden treasure with Dartmouth and the world, and the Arts Integration grant really is the perfect support to do so in an expansive and creative manner,” says Camerlenghi.
Supporting interdisciplinary creativity also encourages students to embrace their multifaceted interests. “The combination of science and music is something that I am very excited to see play out, and I am grateful that my project on this New England tradition connects with the core values of the Arts Integration Initiative,” says Simon Thomas ’27 whose project, The Sacred Harp, combines music, neuroscience, and anthropology to shed light on the reclamation of community.
The Arts Integration Initiative comes as part of the Hop’s commitment to act as a driver of interdisciplinary connections across campus—enriching disparate areas of study through the arts and supporting an arts-infused network of students, faculty and artists.
The projects receiving grants are:
The Dartmouth Rose Window
Nicola Camerlenghi, associate professor of art history, and Elizabeth Rice Mattison, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Academic Programming and Curator of European Art, Hood Museum
Since 1977, Dartmouth has owned a late-medieval, Italian rose window disassembled in 65 stone blocks. Now in the collection of the Hood Museum of Art, the fragmentary window constitutes an opportunity for artistic and scholarly intervention to revitalize it for campus display. This project combines geological, engineering and art historical analyses with digital modeling to devise a compelling plan for installation that integrates teaching, research, and creativity.
Entangled Ecologies
Kate Salesin, lecturer, Department of Computer Science, and Zenovia Toloudi, associate professor of architecture, in collaboration with the Department of Studio Art
This project explores ways in which fashion can be elevated to reflect living systems through the combination of technology, art, and design. Research portions will integrate technology, including 3D fabrication, motion, sensors, and lights, into fashion pieces that respond to the person wearing the clothing, the audience, and the environment. The project culminates in an immersive fashion show.
Hands That Speak, Art That Heals: Mónica Lozano’s “La Trenza” (The Braid) and Intercultural Health and Wellness
Israel Reyes, chair, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and Maria-Clara De Greiff, administrative associate, Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Building on collaborations in the Migrant Lives and Labor curriculum, the faculty will invite documentary photographer Mónica Lozano to present “La Trenza,” an installation she co-created in 2023 by weaving together objects discarded by migrants crossing the border between Mexico and the United States. Through participatory weaving, photography, and film, students, faculty, and community partners will co-create a collective installation that reframes migration as presence, relationality, and continuity, positioning art as method, research, and a catalyst for connection and shared well-being.
Conduit: A Displacement in Space and Time
James Mahoney, senior lecturer, Department of Computer Science
By creating a pair of sculptural wood stereoscopic viewing installations, each with live video feeds from across campus, this installation establishes a tangible link between the arts and sciences. The work facilitates unencumbered stereoscopic viewing of another place, extending that sense of wonder by also employing AI generation to periodically embed magical moments into the live video feed. The result is a unique blend of reality and imagination that spans space and time.
Activating Material Memory: Textile Ecologies of Body, Loom, and Environment
Hayri Dortdivanlioglu, Postdoctoral Fellow at Society of Fellows, Department of Studio Art
Working outdoors with cyanotype-treated threads, the artist will use sunlight and exposure time to chemically register the conditions of making, treating embodied engagement with threads and the loom. Through this process, weaving is explored as a form of material computing, foregrounding the temporal, embodied, and technological forces that typically remain invisible in finished textiles. The loom becomes a site of convergence for body, tool, and environment, yielding a textile that functions as a material archive of ecological and gestural traces.
Spectral: Translating Solar Data into Spatial Sound
Yuening Cai, Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies
A multichannel immersive sound installation that translates solar radiation data from different wavelength bands into a spatialized sonic environment. Drawing on astronomical measurement, sound design, and spatial audio techniques, the work renders the sun’s invisible energetic dynamics perceptible through sound. By transforming scientific data into an embodied listening experience, Spectral explores the shifting relationship between human perception, technological mediation, and the tension between stability and uncertainty in our understanding of natural phenomena.
Sacred Harp Singing: Exploring the Effects of Social Synchrony on Community Building
Simon Thomas ’27
The Sacred Harp tradition has brought singers and communities together since its inception in the mid-1700s. This project will combine data collection methods—ranging from participant observation to EEG scans—to explore the questions of body synchrony and its impact on communal strength. The work combines music, neuroscience, and anthropology to shed light on the reclamation of community. It will culminate in an open-to-the-public singing event.
The Analog Way: Craft as a Contemporary Artistic Inquiry
Jay Yim ’25
An interdisciplinary initiative that reframes hands-on making as a form of research, creativity, and learning. Drawing on Sloyd and Montessori traditions, the project centers on the development of a new, credit-bearing course built from modular workshops integrating woodworking, ceramics, textiles, and metalworking with engineering, environmental studies, and psychology. Through pilot offerings in the Summer Scholars 2026 program, students will explore how working directly with materials builds creative confidence, problem-solving skills, and well-being. It will produce a replicable curriculum, a short documentary film, and a public exhibition showcasing student work and the transformative power of embodied craft.
Breaking the Spectacle: A Conceptual Ethnographic Film on Indigenous Ritual and the Impossibility of Representation
Heyi Zhang ’27
How can film engage forms of knowledge that exceed anthropological description and resist visual spectacle? Drawing on ongoing fieldwork with Indigenous ritual specialists in Sichuan, China, the film experiments with absence, opacity, and non-representational strategies to challenge colonial expectations of transparency. The project advances an arts-driven ethnographic method and will be accompanied by a written manifesto and exhibition.
