Our faculty engage the arts as scholars, painters, sculptors, photographers, composers, performers, teachers, critics, dramaturgs, poets, and more. They are drawn to the University’s culture of melding cross-disciplinary research and creative engagement, and share a love for working in and out of the classroom, studio, or laboratory. At UChicago, a conference on the praxis of theory combines performance with academic papers, a philosopher and a jazz musician co-teach a course on improvisation, and practicing artists partner with scientists and economists to illuminate contemporary problems.

In 2011 UChicago Arts launched an experiment to further activate faculty involvement with the arts through the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, a unique program fostering collaborations between artists and scholars on campus and internationally. The University is a creative incubator where artists, performers, critics, curators, and scholars explore the arts as a form of inquiry and knowledge production. Out of this comes innovative classes, new creative works, and groundbreaking scholarship that impacts the academy, the city, and the world.

Discover the scholarship and artistic production of a few of our faculty below.

Select Faculty

Leslie Buxbaum Danzig
Assistant Professor of the Practice in the Arts, Director of Undergraduate Studies, Committee on Theater and Performance Studies

Heidi Coleman
Senior Lecturer, Theater and Performance Studies, Humanities Collegiate Division

Theaster Gates, Jr.
Professor, Department of Visual Arts and The College Director, Arts + Public Life

Judy Hoffman
Senior Lecturer, Department of Cinema & Media Studies and Department of Visual Arts

Wu Hung
Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College; Director, Center for the Art of East Asia; Consulting Curator, Smart Museum of Art

Ellen MacKay
Chair, Committee on Theater and Performance Studies; Associate Professor, Department of English Language & Literature

John Muse
Assistant Professor, Department of English Language & Literature, Theater and Performance Studies, and the College

William Pope L.
Associate Professor, Department of of Visual Arts

Shulamit Ran
Andrew MacLeish Dinstinguished Service Professor, Department of Music and the College; Artistic Director, Contempo

Srikanth (Chicu) Reddy
Assistant Professor, Department of English Language & Literature, Committee on Creative Writing, and the College; Poetry & Poetics

Jessica Stockholder
Professor and Chair, Department of Visual Arts

Augusta Read Thomas
University Professor of Composition, Department of Music and the College

John Wilkinson
Professor Practice in the Arts, Department of English Language & Literature, Committee on Creative Writing