Announced in February 2018, the Artist in Residence program is a collaboration between a collection of art departments that plans to bring in experts to teach students. The program launched this fall and will bring experts into the classroom in the spring 2020. According to the program’s website, MU will have these artists in residence for varying amounts of time, from a few days to a whole school year.

Program Coordinator Marie Hunter, who was brought onto the project early on, said that while MU already has a vibrant arts community, there is always room for more work to be done.

“This isn’t just for people who are studying music or theater or visual art,” Hunter said. “It’s definitely for those students and for those professors, but it’s also for students who might not be studying the arts at all. The ability to connect the arts to other disciplines is really important to the program … The funding is going to allow for MU to bring some expertise to campus that they may not be able to budget for otherwise in existing art department budgets.”

Documentary filmmaker, writer and artist Alix Lambert is one of the many artists currently set to teach a class through the program. Lambert will be teaching one seminar class about the representation of crime nonfiction and fiction in different projects and mediums. She will also be editing a feature documentary that she has been working on.

“I think the programs are super important both to the artists and to the students,” Lambert said. “It just really allows me to support and time and space [and] resources to focus on my own work also be involved in the community … And I think for students, programs like this bring artists and musicians, journalists, whatever the discipline is, in who might not be able to be there full time, might not be able to teach more than a semester … it just seems like an opportunity for the students to work with voices that they might not otherwise have connections to.”

The new Artist in Residence program brings with it many great opportunities for students to connect with professionals in their field and gain unique insight from their expertise.

_Edited by Janae McKenzie | jmckenzie@themaneater.com_