Calendar of Upcoming ProgramsCommunications Professionals February Program - Postponed
From Stories to Strategy: Lessons from Seven Years of Arts Impact Reporting Over seven years, Arizona Arts’ State of the Arts | Impact Report has evolved from a “well-designed memo” into a strategic storytelling tool—earning a Southern Arizona PRSA Award of Excellence—that communicates the breadth, relevance, and impact of the arts. This session explores how the report was developed, how themes emerge organically from artistic work, and how narrative can align with institutional priorities such as student success, faculty work, and community engagement. The presentation also reflects on ongoing efforts to provide clearer context for research in the arts through collaboration and story-driven approaches. Charlie Snyder, Director of PR, Marketing & Communications, Arizona Arts / College of Fine Arts, University of Arizona will share. As always, members are encouraged to share their experiences and best practices, too. Members are also invited to share topics they would like to discuss at future meetings. Register here. This program is free for members of the Communications Professionals affinity group. Join this affinity group now. Non-members are invited to participate in the discussion with a registration fee of $80. Federal Roles and Responsibilities – A Primer Under the law, the federal government does not control higher education. However, the federal government does play a major role in developing conditions that relate to the work of higher education, primarily through laws and regulations which define parameters for institutional participation in grant and student loan programs. This webinar will focus on the roles of the entities which make up the regulatory “triad,” highlighting responsibilities and authorities of each entity—critical information to know and understand when engaging with information relating to federal higher education policy. Register here. Composing Kin: Teaching Neurodivergent History through Community-Engaged Art Alexis Riley, Assistant Professor of Theatre & Dance at the University of Michigan, presents the first in an ongoing series of webinars on neurodiversity in the arts. Historical sites associated with neurodivergence are often painful, characterized by isolation and exclusion. From institutions to alternative schools, these locales—and the carceral histories they cite—are often obscured in our current landscape, transformed into luxury apartments, shopping districts, and city parks. This obfuscation presents neurodivergence as a contemporary phenomenon, one wholly detached from its broader historical context. How might the arts help us to render that context more perceptible, offering access to neurodivergent pasts while imagining neurodivergent futures? In this webinar, neurodivergent artist Alexis Riley introduces attendees to kinsong: ode to disability ancestors. Crafted alongside a team of over 20 neurodiverse undergraduate and graduate students, kinsong served as a belated memorial to the roughly 2,000 people buried in the Austin State Hospital Cemetery—their graves unmarked and remains unclaimed, likely due to ableism. Throughout the process of creating kinsong, Riley and her collaborators used their bodies to draw attention to the site, prompting passersby to pause and engage the cemetery located (in some cases, literally) in their backyards. At the same time, it also offered the community an opportunity to interrogate their own relationship to that history—and the responsibilities that may result. Blending media from the performance with resources for creative engagement, this webinar ultimately offers neurodivergent and neurotypical attendees alike a framework for engaging arts-based approaches to neurodivergent histories in a range of settings. This online program is offered by a2ru. Please see this page for more information. Members of ICfAD and their Arts Academic Unit are welcome to attend this program at no charge by registering here and listing ICfAD as their institution. For questions or assistance, please email Creative Leadership – The Aesthetics of Administration
Tuesday, March 24, 2026 at 4:30pm Eastern / 3:30pm Central / 2:30pm Mountain / 1:30pm Pacific in the United States As a follow-up to the January 15 discussion about creative practice as research, a presentation offering transferable techniques for making institutional infrastructures visible as designed objects rather than given conditions. What if the budget spreadsheet were a drawing? The tenure policy a score? The committee meeting a durational performance no one applied to stage? This presentation treats administrative systems (curricular decisions, policies, scheduling grids, assessment protocols) as cultural forms that encode inherited theories about how knowledge gets made, how collaboration is structured, and what counts as authorship. Rather than accepting these structures as neutral background or inevitable constraint, Bureaucratic Realism proposes that they are material: legible, visualizable, and available for rework through reflective and creative practice. Drawing on his parallel practice as academic administrator and artist, Troy Richards, Dean, School of Art and Design, Fashion Institute of Technology, will present visual works derived from institutional documents — org charts rendered as kinship diagrams; approval workflows mapped as circulation patterns; a catalogue raisonné of redacted work emails presented in book form. These works do not simply illustrate bureaucracy; they render visible the structures through which administrative labor operates. In doing so, they open a larger inquiry into how the daily work of administration itself might be approached as a form of creative practice rather than treated solely as managerial function. The session will offer transferable techniques for making institutional infrastructures visible as designed objects rather than given constraints. For faculty, this reframes administrative structures as shaping research and pedagogy. For academic leaders, it positions operational work as a site of creative and reflective agency. Bureaucratic Realism does not promise escape from institutional constraint. It asks what becomes possible when we treat administrative form as something we can study, render, and redesign. Members will be encouraged to participate in the discussion. Registration for this discussion is free for members and colleagues within their arts academic units. Register here.
Advancement Officers March Program Join us for this session with industry leaders Dr. Angelique Grant & Dr. Lee Bynum of The Inclusion Firm. As always, members are encouraged to share their experiences and best practices, too. Members are also invited to share topics they would like to discuss at future meetings. This program is free for members of the Advancement Officers affinity group. Join this affinity group now. Non-members are invited to participate in the discussion with a registration fee of $80. Register here. Negotiated Rulemaking – Recent, Current and Anticipated Initiatives After laws are passed by Congress and signed by the President, Executive Branch agencies are often tasked with codifying implementation details through regulation. For all regulations pertaining to programs authorized under Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965, as amended, the Department of Education (USDE) must craft regulations through the negotiated rulemaking process. This webinar will focus on the steps of the negotiated rulemaking process and provide current information about USDE’s ongoing regulatory efforts. Register here. Communications Professionals Online Programs Advancement Officers Online Programs
All programs will be hosted online the last Tuesdays of January, February, March and April.
Dates: January 27, February 24, March 31, April 28
Time: 4:00 Eastern / 3:00 Central / 2:00 Mountain / 1:00 Pacific. Online programs are 60 minutes.
Programs may include topics such as Gift Planning, Capital Campaign Success Stories, Building Team Culture, and other topics to be determined with member input. Invitations for each meeting will be sent. Registration is free for members of each affinity group or $80 per session for non-members. Join this affinity group now.
All programs will be hosted online the third Thursdays of January, February, March and April.
Dates: January 15 January 14, February 19, March 19, April 16 (Please note the January date change)
Time: 4:00 Eastern / 3:00 Central / 2:00 Mountain / 1:00 Pacific. Online programs are 60 minutes.
Programs may include topics such as One-Staff Wonders: Efficiencies that Have Led to Success, Best Practices: Processes and Procedures, Working with Faculty in Meeting Curricular Needs, Case Studies: Student Workers and Programs, Creating Safe Spaces for Rest and other topics to be determined with member input. Invitations for each meeting will be sent. Registration is free for members of each affinity group or $80 per session for non-members. Join this affinity group now.
Tuesday, October 6 - Thursday, October 8, 2026 Detroit, Michigan A printable Save the Date flyer can be found here. |
