Advisory Board Resources

The School of the Arts serves as a vibrant urban hub for the study, practice, and integration of the arts—empowering 21st-century artists to live and create. The School cultivates new models of interdisciplinary innovation, entrepreneurial initiative, and collaborative community engagement to prepare artists, and all students, to thrive in a diverse world.

The School of the Arts includes:

•  Art, Design and Visual Studies
• Music; Theatre, Film and Creative Writing
• Games, Interactive Media & Mobile Technology
• Arts Entrepreneurship minor
• The Stein Luminary
• The Blue Galleries 

School of the Arts students span 23.22% (1074 students) of the College of Arts and Science (COAS) majors. 

Student undergraduate majors:

• Art, Design and Visual Studies: 395
• Games Interactive Media Mobile: 226
• Music: 126
• Theatre, Film and Creative Writing: 334

Graduate majors: 36

• Theatre, Film and Creative Writing: 16
• Art, Design and Visual Studies: 9
• Music: 11

The School of the Arts Advisory Board is dedicated to fostering excellence, innovation, and belonging within our artistic community. We serve as advocates, advisors, and champions for the School of the Arts, striving to enhance its educational programs, amplify its impact, and enrich the experiences of students, faculty, and staff. We champion the role of the university as a cultural anchor that is connected to our city, region, state, and beyond. 

Through our dedication, expertise, and passion for the arts, we strive to enrich the educational experience, elevate the reputation, and advance the mission of the School of the Arts, empowering individuals to inspire, innovate, and transform the world through the power of creativity. Our mission is to:

Support Academic Excellence: We share and tell the stories of artistic integrity and creative excellence across all disciplines for our faculty, undergraduate students, and graduate students.

Enhance Experiential Learning: We help identify opportunities for our students to engage in experiences outside traditional classroom settings to further their artistic and creative growth through a range of career and civic paths

Foster Creativity and Innovation: We cultivate an environment that nurtures creativity, experimentation, and interdisciplinary collaboration, empowering students to push boundaries and explore new artistic horizons to address opportunities and challenges in our communities.

Promote Belonging, Access, and Inclusion: We champion diversity in all its forms, fostering an inclusive environment where individuals from diverse backgrounds feel valued, respected, and empowered to express themselves authentically.

Strengthen Community Engagement: We engage with alumni, donors, industry partners, and the broader community to forge meaningful connections, create opportunities for professional development, and promote the value of the arts in society.

Ensure Sustainability and Growth: We help work to secure resources, develop strategic partnerships, and implement innovative initiatives that support the long-term sustainability and growth of the School of the Arts, ensuring its continued success for generations to come.

Start with Art Poster
The School of the Arts Excellence Fund champions the creative talents of our students, offering them unmatched opportunities to amplify their academic and artistic pursuits. Fueled by the philanthropic generosity of our community, this fund breathes life into extraordinary experiences beyond the traditional classroom. It enables access to experiential learning opportunities, internships, conferences, artist residencies, exclusive masterclasses, innovative workshops, and state-of-the-art materials. 

The School of the Arts Excellence Fund plays a pivotal role in shaping the next generation of leading artists, designers, and performers by fostering a rich environment of exploration and professional development.

Our region is blessed with a vibrant arts presence but most organizations need help. We aim to provide resources for students to gain valuable skills and experience by interning at art organizations and organizations who wish to accentuate the arts as a method of improving their culture and impact through internships, field schools, Investigate Boise courses, and the Arts Passport.

The Arts Passport
The Arts have deep intrinsic value where making, creating, and experiencing art and creative activities can help us feel connected, inspired, and nurtured. Art can provide an outlet for self-expression and a way to process and express emotions. Engaging in creative activities can help increase our health and well-being. 

We aim to help all students at the university learn how to live an artful and how the university can support that whether it’s through classes, degrees, events, exhibitions, and more. We partner with local arts and cultural agencies to provide opportunities for our students off campus as well. For example, Boise State sponsors the Boise Art Museum so all faculty, staff, and students can attend for free. 

Stein Luminary and Onramp for Idaho Schools Partnership
The School of the Arts is well-positioned to become the front door of the university to nurture community partnerships in audience engagement, research and creative activity, and student experiences in K-12 and higher education. We offer an Arts Passport program with local arts partners, a creative placemaking program with the Idaho Commission on the Arts, and we are working with the Idaho Policy Institute to provide impact reporting on the Treefort Music Festival. Another example is how the GIMM team continues its collaboration with Onramp to develop augmented reality activities on iPads to pair with the museum’s historical collection for K-12 visitors (facilitated by Extended Studies’ professional development: Terra Feast and John Kiser).

(Example: School of the Arts Working Group: Storytelling and Technology: Generative Artificial Intelligence.)

The importance of art in storytelling and decision-making is becoming increasingly recognized. Our experience with the Stein Luminary is an example of using art and technology as a way to demonstrate data, trends, science, and much more. By visualizing potential changes to data and the impact of those changes, government and environmental agencies, businesses, and other organizations will make quicker and better decisions. The School of the Arts is also hosting a working group that is exploring the role of AI in our curriculum and our responsibilities with teaching, research, creative activities, and service.

In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative force across various disciplines, including the arts. As AI continues to reshape industries and academic fields, it becomes imperative for arts faculty to incorporate AI tools and methodologies into their research and curriculum in discerning ways. This initiative outlines a comprehensive plan to assist arts faculty in learning how to effectively integrate AI into their classes as both a point of exposure and a creative learning opportunity, thereby enhancing the educational experience for students and preparing them for the demands of the future.

We have nationally and internationally renowned faculty who are experts in their fields, and we want to provide the support to help re-train them with new methodologies, techniques, and processes that advance their research and benefit hundreds of students.

IRA: Rapid Response Design Lab
The School is home to faculty who are regionally, nationally, and internationally renowned for their research and creative activity. The school, in partnership with the COAS strategic plan and the university’s Grand Challenges initiative, is investing in collaborative, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary efforts in addition to traditional processes and practices. 

One project is the Resilience Cooperative where faculty Jill Annie Margaret (ADVS) and Alyssa Cole (Social Work) introduce participants to the wonder and creative potential of printmaking while learning the biology of stress reactions on the nervous system and inner resilience to bring it back into balance, building resilience skills and improving emotional and physical well-being. Mindfulness, empathy, and improving relationships with self and others through visual art are central to the cooperative’s mission.

Giving Levels
The university is undertaking Unbridled, a $500 million capital comprehensive campaign strategy centered around endowed faculty positions and endowed scholarships. For the campaign, the School of the Arts is working to elevate each of our art disciplines by providing resources to support living an artful life, artistic and creative workforce development for our students, problem-solving, and decision-making through the arts, and community engagement. 

School of the Arts students are finding their footing to experiment with new tools and creative content in the Stein Luminary.

• For Artfort, a GIMM capstone team developed new audio-visualizers that respond to inputs from touch, instruments, and recorded music (led by Ryan Donahue in Graphic Design). Other capstone projects created templates for building interactive spaces, like escape rooms and cycloramic illustrations (led by GIMM Capstone instructor: Karen Doty). Another GIMM team continues its collaboration with Onramp’s iPad program to develop augmented-reality activities on iPads that pair with the museum’s historical collection for K-12 visitors. (Extended Studies: Terra Feast and John Kiser).
• An internship supervised by Idaho National Laboratory’s visualization team and supported by the Center for Advanced Energy Studies allowed Harrison Groom (‘24-GIMM) to serve as technical support for all GIMM projects.
• The Stein Luminary has also served as a gathering base for BASH (Boise Arts & Sciences Hub) events with the ArtSci community of faculty and students, supported by the COAS Innovation Hub grant. Using visualization techniques and touch tools, the BASH team launched 3D objects, modeling both molecules and museum sculptures, onto the walls so that they can be examined with touch gestures (Konrad Meister-CHEM, Eryn Pierce-GD, Oliviero Andreussi-CHEM, Lisa Hunt-SOA). ADVS student designer interns on the projects include Liv Stime (‘24-GD/internship by NSF grant), Mayra Arellano (‘24-GD/internship by NSF grant), and Madison Miller (‘25-GD/intern by Center for Research and Creative Activity).
• In collaboration with art history students, TFCW interns are prototyping a live sci-fi meets museum performance using the museum interface, called “The Luminarians” (led by internship supervisor: Lisa Hunt, directed by Jada Johnstone ‘23-TFCW). The conversation among artists and scientists continues with custom interactive exhibits, like “Navigating the Sagebrush Sea,” (SOA grant: Manuel Gomez-Navarro-WL, Jen Forbey-BIOL, Brie Schettle-MFA’23), “Space for All” (K-12 programming with Physics AstroTAC, Brian Jackson) and coming soon “Earth as Art” (from USGS), as well as the Zena Creek Field School program (Stephanie Lenhart). In partnership with the Wassmuth Center, a reusable extension exhibit was also built for the celebration of the 75th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Curation and design are built by the Luminary work-study team: Michaela Miller (‘25-Art History), Karissa Haskin (‘25-Ceramics), Koletta Didio (‘25-Art History), Laci Erich (‘25-Non-Profit Writing, Music) and Tatum Miller (‘26-Art History).
• The Music Department featured a new fundraising program, a Spotlight Soiree, that featured various performances from new faculty and students where the funds are used to ensure that quality musical education remains within reach for all students, regardless of their circumstances. We’re committed to breaking down barriers and empowering the next generation of Broncos as they shape the musical future of Idaho (organized by Linda Kline, Eric Alexander, Myron Peterson, Christina Mancheni, Rachel Reeves, Wendy Skeen, Hannah Lee).
• Boise Art Museum and Boise State University welcomed Ryan! Feddersen a visiting artist, including a lecture at the Center for Visual Arts to complement a BAM exhibit, Coyote Now, which features installations and public artworks that invite people to consider their relationships to the environment, technology, and society through participation (Kirsten Furlong organized this for our university).
• Boise State Theatre and Boise State Music are proud to co-present the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic, “The Sound of Music.” The final collaboration between Rodgers & Hammerstein was destined to become the world’s most beloved musical. The Sound of Music won the hearts of audiences worldwide, earning five Tony Awards and five Oscars.
• Art, Design, and Visual Studies finished their interdisciplinary art history series on “Extinction”. The “Extinction” speaker series delves into the visual and material representations of Earth’s dwindling biodiversity, examining the historical contexts behind the treatment of living organisms as natural resources, commodities, and objects of aesthetic or scientific inquiry. When did efforts for preservation and extinction management begin? How have visual and material culture mediated, naturalized, challenged, and responded to human-induced species extinction? Internationally renowned practitioners of ecocriticism from fields such as art history, history, and media studies will engage with these questions, probing the interdisciplinary intersections of art, ecology, and the politics of representation (led by faculty Tom Grusiecki, Niharika Dinkar, Emily Wakild).
• The Department of Theatre, Film and Creative Writing for the Spring Film Showcase and the Narrative Television Initiative premiere of “OUT.” The Student Film Showcase features exceptional work from undergraduate film students. The Narrative Television Initiative is a program in which students write, film, and produce an original pilot episode of television (led by Ryan Cannon).