What is CAAD?
Creative Arts Across Disciplines (CAAD) began at Vassar College as a Mellon Foundation-funded initiative. Through partnerships with other initiatives, programs, departments, and projects, CAAD continues to serve as an experimental laboratory for trying out new models of research, pedagogy, practice, and community engagement that foreground critical making and doing as complementary activities to critical thinking.
Goals that have persisted from the grant include:
- Fostering opportunities for boundary-crossing artistic discovery and creation
- Broadening collaboration within the arts, as well as between the arts and other disciplines
- Enhancing the impact and curricular tie-ins of visiting artist programs
- Deepening the engagement of Vassar students across the curriculum with methods and ideas from the arts
CAAD student-faculty research opportunities for next summer will be posted in January 2027! See examples of past year’s projects.
Through a generous donation by Henry Wendt III and Holly P. Wendt ’57, CAAD provides summer program opportunities for students to work together on creative research projects.
Since 2017, CAAD has partnered with the Music Department to produce MODfest.
Events
Film Screening and Discussion with Choreographer and Filmmaker Tamar Rogoff.
Join us for an evening with documentary filmmaker Chris Kepple, whose new documentary chronicles the life and legacy of photographer Rollie McKenna (Vassar class of 1940), who was the subject of a major retrospective at the Loeb Art Center in 2024. Life and Photography will appeal to audiences interested in 20th-century literature, local history, portrait photography, architecture, literary history, popular culture, queer culture, feminist culture, and poetry. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the director.
This event is free and open to the public.
