Please join us for the official launch and celebration of the UGA Arts Collaborative, hosted by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts. The event will feature food, drink, welcoming remarks, and a chance to gather in community with creative practitioners and collaborators.

The Arts Collaborative is a collective resource for UGA faculty, students, staff, and community members to foster creative, collaborative projects and advanced research in the arts, with the aim to increase opportunities for creative collaboration at UGA and beyond. Through the Willson Center, the Arts Collaborative is a research cluster supported by the Office of Research.

All are welcome!

Directions to the Athenaeum, including parking information, are available here.

The event begins at 5:30 p.m. with remarks at 6 p.m. from Mark Callahan and David Saltz, artistic and executive directors of the Arts Collaborative; graduate students Maddy Underwood and Nkululeko Zungu; and Anna Stenport, Dean of the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.

Mark Callahan is the artistic director of the UGA Arts Collaborative, and serves on the faculty of the Lamar Dodd School of Art. He is a graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art and Rhode Island School of Design, where he was a member of the European Honors Program in Rome, Italy. Callahan’s work has been included in exhibitions at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), Club Internet, MAMA: Showroom for Media and Moving Art in the Netherlands, the Telfair Museum in Savannah, Georgia, and used in concert by R.E.M. as a large-scale video projection. He was a co-principal investigator of “Enhancing Imaginative and Collaborative STEM Capacity Through Creative Inquiry,” an Innovations in Graduate Education project supported by the National Science Foundation. Callahan’s essay “The Broadest Possible Interpretation of Creativity” is included in Critique Is Creative by Liz Lerman and John Borstel (Wesleyan Press).

David Saltz is head of the theory/history area of the department of theatre and film studies and the PhD program in Theatre and Performance Studies, executive director of UGA Arts Collaborative, and executive director of ACTR. He is a specialist in performance theory, theatre and performance history, digital media, and directing. His primary research focuses have been the philosophy of theatre and performance, and the interaction between live performance and digital media. He was Principal Investigator of "Virtual Vaudeville," a large-scale research project funded by the National Science Foundation to simulate a nineteenth century vaudeville performance on the computer. He has explored the use of computer technology extensively in his own work as a director and teacher. Along those lines he established the Interactive Performance Laboratory at UGA, has directed a series of productions incorporating real-time interactive digital media, and has created interactive sculptural installations that have been exhibited nationally. He is co-director for the NEH Institute on Digital Technologies in Theatre and Performance Studies. He is co-author (with Sarah Bay-Cheng and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck) of Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field (University of Michigan Press, 2015), co-editor (with David Krasner) of the book Staging Philosophy: Intersections between Theatre, Performance and Philosophy (University of Michigan Press, 2006), co-editor (with Martin Kagel) of Open Wounds: Holocaust Theater and the Legacy of George Tabori (University of Michigan Press, 2022), and has published numerous articles in scholarly journals and books.

Maddy Underwood is a graduate assistant in interdisciplinary arts research and an MFA student in the Lamar Dodd School of Art. She is an artist, designer, reader, and craftsperson interested in collection and collaboration. Born in Nashville, TN, she graduated from Washington University with a BFA in communication design and has subsequently worked as a designer and printer with numerous recording artists and bands. Her work has been exhibited at the Hamilton Wood Type Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, as well as various venues across Nashville.

Nkululeko Zungu is a 2024-2025 Arts Collaborative research affiliate and a graduate candidate in the Hugh Hodgson School of Music, where his studies focus on contemporary writing styles in composition. He finds pleasure in exploring music from traditional Classical to modern electronic and can be heard writing with the frame of mind, “Let me not, no, just add to the noise. Let me harmonize to the silence.” He has collaborated with groundbreaking composers like Pulitzer Prize recipient Kate Soper, Dr. Ken Ueno, and has seen contemporary ensembles perform his music, including the Wet Ink Ensemble. Nkululeko appreciates combining his writing practice with performing his works in unconventional settings, as seen in his performance at the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery’s Dome Theater and the Georgia Museum of Art. He has been described by Dr. Hendrik Hofmeyr, South Africa’s most performed Classical music composer, as “an artist who created from within combining all aspects of his life.” He prides himself on being a well-rounded artist.