USC launches new presidential arts initiative

Peek inside a classroom at one of USC’s six conservatory-level arts schools on any given day and you’ll see some of the country’s most talented students training with master faculty at the forefront of their crafts. These aspiring dancers, thespians, composers, designers, filmmakers, architects and more immerse themselves in their chosen forms of expression to become the best of the best in their respective fields.

A new initiative launched by USC President Carol Folt aims to ignite arts collaborations that build on that individual excellence. Called USC Arts Now, the presidential initiative will foster projects and programming that put USC’s arts schools — along with USC Museums and USC’s arts and humanities initiative Visions and Voices — into new, unexpected collaborations with each other. It also aims to connect the arts to all disciplines at the university’s campuses, including fields as diverse as the health sciences and computing, and to artists, arts industries and arts institutions in Los Angeles and around the world.

“USC is a vibrant arts center in one of the world’s most important creative capitals,” Folt said. “USC Arts Now will enhance the arts in every corner of the university and raise the visibility of our talented students and award-winning faculty on local and global stages. I can’t wait to see the outpouring of creativity as we open new avenues for arts collaborations across our campuses and help foster boundary-breaking work.”

Folt created a new position to marshal the arts efforts across the university with the appointment of the first USC vice provost for the arts, Josh Kun.

“USC Arts Now focuses on the arts as an interface, as a place of connection between different bodies of thought, different systems of knowing and different disciplines in different fields,” said Kun, professor and chair in cross-cultural communication at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. “A big part of this initiative is to create the budgetary, curricular and programmatic opportunities to allow interdisciplinary work to happen with greater ease than in the past.”

USC Arts Now: Accelerating ‘moonshots’

The new initiative will draw upon USC’s rich resources in creative expression. In addition to the university’s six professional arts schools — the USC School of Architecture, the USC Roski School of Art and Design, the USC School of Dramatic Arts, the USC Kaufman School of Dance, the USC School of Cinematic Arts and the USC Thornton School of Music — USC is home to two museums, the USC Fisher Museum of Art and the USC Pacific Asia Museum.

USC Visions and Voices organizes an array of interdisciplinary events, while its offshoot Arts in Action nurtures positive social change by activating arts projects between community partners, students and faculty.

The leaders of these arts entities form the backbone of the USC Arts Council, a group of Trojan leaders assembled by Kun to guide the direction of USC Arts Now. Kun has also invited leaders from the Keck School of Medicine of USC, the USC Center for Generative AI and Society, and the USC Arts and Climate Collective to join the council. That’s because Kun envisions the activities of USC Arts Now as supporting three of Folt’s “moonshot” goals for the university: transforming health sciences, accelerating advanced computing and achieving significant sustainability benchmarks.

“I’ve been focusing my work with USC Arts Now on leaning into the intersections between the arts and health, the arts and advanced computing, and the arts and climate sustainability,” Kun said. “I’ve picked those three moonshots as key anchors.”

Building on existing collaborations

Kun points to arts and health as a particularly robust and rapidly growing area of research and collaboration at USC. Various programs across the University Park and Health Science campuses, as well as at USC hospitals, center the arts as integral to patients’ healing and weave the arts into medical education to help students sharpen their diagnostic skills and tend to their own wellness.

In March, Kun and Michele Kipke, associate vice president for strategic health alliances at the Keck School of Medicine, led a daylong retreat for USC deans and faculty to spark new research collaborations between the arts and health sciences. Similar retreats are planned for arts and artificial intelligence in November and arts and climate next spring.

VOICES

Learn what the deans of the six arts schools and other USC arts leaders are saying about the USC Arts Now initiative.

USC Arts Now will also expand upon the work of the recently launched USC Center for Generative AI and Society — a collaboration among USC Annenberg, School of Cinematic Arts, the USC Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy, the USC Rossier School of Education and the USC Viterbi School of Engineering — to catalyze cross-pollination between AI and the arts. One example is the center’s AI for Media and Storytelling initiative, which explores AI-assisted filmmaking, immersive environments, neural graphics, music visualization and more.

In September, USC Arts Now debuted its first public event: a daylong symposium exploring AI’s impact on the arts called “Beyond the Human?: From the Metaphysical to the Physical,” which Kun co-curated with the internationally acclaimed Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang. Speakers and performers from visual art, dance, technology, literature, architecture, film and music converged around artistic, sociocultural and ethical questions raised by the emergence of generative AI and autonomous robots. A book based on presentations from the symposium is in the works.

Kun has plans to organize public symposia on arts and health and arts and climate, and to put together books on these themes as well. “The books will be physical takeaways of the kind of thinking that all of these symposia are producing,” Kun said.

Broadening USC’s impact

“Beyond the Human?” drew local, national and international artists and scholars to the USC University Park Campus. Kun anticipates that future USC Arts Now symposia will also offer Trojans opportunities to forge connections that extend beyond the USC community.

“It’s really important that the work we’re doing with the arts is responding to and in dialogue with the wider world,” said Kun, who was recently nominated for a 2025 Grammy Award for Best Album Notes for SONtrack Original De La Película “Al Son De Beno” (soundtrack from the film Al Son de Beno). “I’ve been looking at possibilities for partnerships or collaborations with international partners, whether it be global university partners or global arts institutions in key art scenes around the world.”

The official podcast of USC Arts Now, called Arts Talk and hosted by Kun, is another tool for igniting conversations with collaborators far and wide. Each episode explores key issues and debates facing the arts and contemporary society, featuring USC faculty, students and staff in dialogue with artists and arts leaders across L.A. and the world. The debut episode features a conversation on AI’s impact on the arts between prominent L.A. artist Nancy Baker Cahill and Holly Willis, professor at the School of Cinematic Arts, chair of the Media Arts + Practice division and co-director of the Center for Generative AI and Society.

Additionally, Kun is working on creating an artist-in-residency program and hopes to launch an arts incubator that would provide grants to students and faculty working on interdisciplinary projects such as arts-based companies, arts apps or commissions for new artworks. “It would borrow from a kind of startup tech model but be centered around the arts,” he said.

USC Arts Now: Something for everyone

While USC Arts Now will open new doors for arts students, the initiative’s reach is not limited to students formally training in artistic fields.

“Our goal is to inspire all students, no matter the field, to engage with the arts as a way of being and thinking,” Kun said. “The arts belong to everyone.”

He explained that participating in arts activities supports not only physical and emotional health but also inquiry, research and problem-solving of all kinds.

“The more artistic behaviors and practices we incorporate into our lives, the more balanced and nuanced our critical thinking is,” Kun said. “We’re more able to imagine new possibilities, new ways of thinking and new social formations — to not accept what’s in front of us as the only option.”