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The PhD in Creativity is currently closed to applications. Our next available start term is summer 2025; the application for that term is expected to open in fall 2024.
Read about us in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
About the PhD in Creativity's Partnership with the Balvenie and Questlove
The Balvenie and Questlove are supporting emerging creative pursuits with an opportunity for an aspiring maker to begin their own quest through a pioneering scholarship program with University of the Arts. This scholarship program will give one aspiring creative mind, from anywhere in the U.S., the opportunity to undertake the university’s first-of-its-kind PhD in Creativity. University of the Arts’ scholarship program marks an exciting commencement of a long-term mission for The Balvenie and Questlove to expand and showcase the beautiful convergence of craft and creativity.
Read the official UArts press release here.
UArts is also grateful to the Majik Foundation – Westphal Family and anonymous private donors for their generosity and support of the PhD in Creativity.
Director, Faculty, and Staff
Jonathan Fineberg
Program Director, PhD in Creativity
Zach Savich
Visiting Faculty, Creativity Immersion
Buzz Spector
Visiting Faculty, Creativity Immersion
Current PhD Candidates
Kehinde Bademosi
PhD in Creativity
Branding expert and storytelling strategist based in Florence, Italy
Lorna Boucher
PhD in Creativity
Chief Marketing & Communications Officer for Connecticut-based Imperative Execution Inc.
Andy Carlson
PhD in Creativity
D.C.-based analyst and planner
Jamal Jones
PhD in Creativity
Jazz composer, arranger, and performer based in Philadelphia
James Lewis
PhD in Creativity
NY-based saxophonist and composer and inaugural Balvenie Fellow, selected by Questlove
'Aolani Robinson
PhD in Creativity
Writing instructor based in Louisiana
Jennifer Schaupp
PhD in Creativity
Pittsburgh-based playwright, theater artist, and university and community instructor
Click on each student's photo for more information on their background and dissertation.
Alumni
Rose Benson
PhD in Creativity
Pennsylvania-based nurse anesthetist, Army Major, and printmaker
Susannah Eig
PhD in Creativity
Florida-based theater director, producer and actor
Susan Gordon
PhD in Creativity
WSET-certified wine writer based in Rome and The Bronx
Eugene Hughes
PhD in Creativity
London-based psychotherapist, Artgym founder, and filmmaker
Jessica Hunter
PhD in Creativity
Associate Director of Innovation, Colorado College
Frank Machos
PhD in Creativity
Executive Director, Office of the Arts & Creative Learning, School District of Philadelphia
Patricia Salkin
PhD in Creativity
Provost, Graduate and Professional Divisions, Touro College in New York
Abel Tilahun
PhD in Creativity
Filmmaker and artist based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Cynthia Haveson Veloric
PhD in Creativity
Philadelphia-based art historian, environmentalist and researcher in American Art
Click on each alum's photo for more information on their background and dissertation.
Advisory Councils
The Advisory Council is comprised of distinguished professionals across diverse disciplines whose knowledge and expertise has contributed to the formation of this program. They will assist in the recommendation and selection of outside advisors to serve each dissertation.
David Campbell
Professor of Physics, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Materials Science and Engineering and former Provost, Boston University
Roy Campbell
Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Professor of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
John Carlin
Author, television producer, and record producer. Founder of Funny Garbage, one of the first digital design companies in New York, and The Red Hot Organization, one of the first major AIDS charities. He teaches entertainment law at Columbia Law School.
Anjan Chatterjee
Professor of Neurology, Psychology, and Architecture, University of Pennsylvania. Director of Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics and author of The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art
Fang Lijun
Artist and entrepreneur, Beijing. Associated with Cynical Realism in the 1990s, Fang is a leading vanguard artist.He is also a founder of the National Archives of Contemporary Art.
Jack Flam
President of the Dedalus Foundation and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Art and Art History at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Kathleen A. Foster
The Robert L. McNeil, Jr., Senior Curator of American Art, and Director, Center for American Art. Curator and art historian, she has published on nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists such as Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, and Andrew Wyeth; most recently, she organized the exhibition and catalogue American Watercolor in the Age of Homer and Sargent at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University; recipient of the MacArthur “genius” award as well as an Emmy and a Peabody Award for his television series, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross
Kevin Hamilton
Dean of the College of Fine + Applied Arts and Professor of New Media, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; co-author of Lookout America!: The Secret Hollywood Studio at the Heart of the Cold War
Hannah B Higgins
A Professor and founding Director of the interdisciplinary BA in IDEAS at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her books include Fluxus Experience (University of California Press, 2002), The Grid Book (MIT Press, 2009) and the co-edited anthology Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of Digital Art (University of California Press, 2012).
Emilia Kabakov
Artist, NY. A pioneer, with Ilya Kabakov, of installation art, with recent retrospectives at the Guggenhiem Museum in NY, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, and the Tate Modern in London
William Kinderman
Leon M. Klein and Elaine Krown Klein Chair of Performance Studies in the Herb Alpert School of Music, University of California, Los Angeles. A leading authority on Beethoven and internationally known pianist, scholar and recording artist, he has received a lifetime achievement award from the Humboldt Foundation. He has published a dozen books, including Beethoven, The Creative Process in Music from Mozart to Kurtag, and studies of Mozart and Wagner.
Bon Ku
Bon Ku, MD, MPP is the Assistant Dean for Health & Design at Thomas Jefferson University. An emergency medicine physician, he also directs the Health Design Lab which has featured in The New York Times, CNBC, and Architectural Digest. His book, Health Design Thinking, co-written by Ellen Lupton, was published in 2019.
Cynthia Oliver
Professor of Dance, Associate Vice Chancellor for Research, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; choreographer of Virago-Man, in the 2017 BAM Next Wave Series and currently touring.
Larry Silver
Larry Silver is Farquhar Professor of Art History, emeritus, at the University of Pennsylvania and past President of the College Art Association. He specializes in Northern Old Master painting and graphics and his books include Peasant Scenes and Landscapes (Penn 2006), Marketing Maximilian (Princeton, 2008), and Jewish Art: A Modern History (2011, with Samantha Baskind).
Fred Tomaselli
Artist, NY; best known for detailed paintings of birds, plants, and transparent human forms in a combination of unorthodox materials, and for his fantastical reimaginings of the pictures on the front page of the New York Times; represented by James Cohan Gallery and White Cube in London, with solo exhibitions in New York at the Whitney Museum and the Brooklyn Museum
Deborah Willis
UArts BFA '75 (Photography);Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University; she is an artist, photographer, curator, photo historian, and author.Willis is also a recipient of the MacArthur “genius” award, among many other accolades.
Jerry (Yoram) Wind
Lauder Professor of Marketing Emeritus atthe Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Internationally known for pioneering research on organizational buying behavior, market segmentation, conjoint analysisand marketing strategy.
Zhang Xiaogang
Artist, Beijing;one of the leading painters of the first generation of artists to emerge in China after the Cultural Revolution and an artist of global influence
Semir Zeki
Professor of Neurobiology and Neuroesthetics at University College London and FMedSci Fellow of the Royal Society
The members of the
University Advisory Committeeare Quinn Bauriedel, Erin Elman, Bill Gast, Emily Mattingly, Jesse Pires, Alan Price, Paul Schuette, and Jesse Zaritt.
The
Admissions Committeeremains anonymous. It includes a research physician, a professor of physics and engineering, a former Research 1 university administrator, a studio artist and administrator, an art historian specializing in American and African American art, a museum curator with degrees in anthropology, and the director of the PhD at the University of the Arts, as chair.