January 27, 2025
Eight major event projects across the University were awarded grants
The Institute for Advanced Study announces more than $60,000 in funding to support eight new Special Events grant projects across the University of Minnesota focused on the arts, humanities, and design.
The Special Events Grant Program is part of the Executive Vice President and Provost’s Imagine Fund initiative to support large, public events that promote profound understanding of the human condition, excellence, innovation, collaboration, interdisciplinary dialogue, and greater public engagement with the University.
Special Events grant recipients will also receive significant administrative and promotional support from the Institute for Advanced Study, which administers the award selection process and grant program.
Grantees for the Fall 2024 Imagine Fund Special Events Grant Call include the following.
Age-Friendly University Day 2025
As we age, we all deserve the opportunity to access lifelong learning and stay connected to our community. Sadly, older adults are often marginalized, and their valuable contributions to society are overlooked. At the University of Minnesota, the state's first age-friendly university, we are committed to engaging lifelong learners, retirees, and older Minnesotans through meaningful conversation and camaraderie. Imagine Funds will help support the 2025 Age-Friendly University Day, a flagship event that will bring together over 500 older adults to explore finding purpose in later life. This in-person event, held on the Twin Cities campus and streamed statewide, will unite the University community with older adults to promote an age-inclusive, intergenerational campus. Save the Date! Age-Friendly University Day is June 23, 2025
Rajean Moone: Faculty Director, Health Policy & Management, School of Public Health, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
El Vaiven: 21st Century Art of Puerto Rico and Its Diaspora
From September 9 through December 6, 2025, the Katherine E. Nash Gallery will present El Vaivén: 21st Century Art of Puerto Rico and Its Diaspora, a multidisciplinary exhibition, accompanying bilingual catalogue, and a series of related public programs, which will explore the physical and psychological ebb and flow of decades of migration that has resulted in more persons of Puerto Rican descent living across the fifty United States than in Puerto Rico. For the run of the exhibition, related events will include an opening lecture with the exhibition curators and a traditional Afro-Puerto Rican Bomba drum and dance performance by Boriken Cultural Center (September 2025); a hybrid panel discussion with select exhibition artists based in Minnesota, Puerto Rico, and New York (October 2025), and a presentation and discussion with a local scholar on Minnesota’s Puerto Rican diaspora (November 2025). Save the Date: September 9–December 6, 2025; Katherine E. Nash Gallery
Terez Iacovino: Assistant Curator, Katharine E. Nash Gallery; Art, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Great World Texts, MN Student Conference
The Great World Texts in Minnesota Student Conference connects high school teachers and students across the state with scholars at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities through the shared project of reading and discussing a classic piece of world literature. The Student Conference will bring together students from 6 participating schools to share their creative responses to the text and hear from several distinguished speakers, including the text’s author. The conference provides high school students, teachers, and community members an opportunity to think deeply about current social issues that connect them to each other and communities around the world. Great World Texts MN is a collaboration between the Minnesota Writing Project, University of Minnesota Libraries, University of Minnesota College Readiness Consortium, University of Minnesota Twin Cities English and Writing Studies Departments, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison Center for Humanities. Coming Spring 2025.
Lee Fisher: Director, Writing Studies, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
International Summer Institute for Reggae Studies 2025
Reggae music lovers unite! The University of Minnesota International Summer Institute for Reggae Studies (ISIRS) brings together outstanding artists, scholars, students and community members for a week-long summit designed to foster the study and performance of reggae and related musical genres, as world-renowned cultural expressions of the Jamaican people that warrant greater academic attention and appreciation. Through an immersive daily schedule of scholarly lectures, moderated discussions, instrumental clinics, ensemble rehearsals and jam sessions with acclaimed guest artists, ISIRS offers America’s first and only university-based program of intensive instruction in the art and techniques of reggae music. Join us as we immerse ourselves in Jamaican music history, instrumental/vocal conception and ensemble performance—from roots, mento, ska and rocksteady, to reggae, dancehall, raggamuffin, and beyond. Coming Spring 2025.
Scott Currie: Associate Professor, Music, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
La Llorona: Exploring Human Rights and Justice for the Mayan Victims of the 1982–1983 Genocide in Guatemala with Jayro Bustamante
This event is a presentation and screening of the movie La Llorona (2019) by Guatemalan film director Jayro Bustamante. Bustamante, whose work focuses on human rights issues in Guatemala, is an award-winning director who has received wide attention in the international film festival circuit. He will present his work in general, but especially as it pertains to the truth commissions seeking justice for the victims of the genocidal civil war of the 1980’s and ’90s. This movie focuses on the search for justice for the victims of atrocities committed during the conflict through the spirit of the Mayan people as personified by the folkloric character of La Lorona, even in the face of official efforts to indemnify the perpetrators. The audience will have the opportunity to participate during the event in the form of a panel discussion following the screening. Coming Spring 2025.
Edward Eiffler: Senior Teaching Specialist, Spanish and Portuguese, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Mapping Parallel Trauma: The Colonized and Colonizers, an Indigenous-led Approach
The “Mapping Parallel Trauma” project is an innovative, collaborative, interdisciplinary, and publicly engaging series of workshops. This proposal builds on two years of our IAS Research and Creative Collaborative group, “Two-Eyed Seeing and Third Spaces,” comprised of three settlers in academia and three Indigenous community leaders. Partner Jewell Arcoren (behavioral health specialist, community artist-activist, and enrolled member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Nation) created the term “parallel trauma,” referring to the fact that both the colonized and colonizers suffer trauma from genocide, though clearly in different ways. Jewell’s thesis work in intergenerational trauma led her to create and pilot the Mapping Parallel Trauma workshops with her long-time collaborator Onryu Laura Kennedy, a white, converted Buddhist settler on Dakota and Anishinaabe homelands. Workshops will take place March 25, April 8, April 22, and May 6. Learn more and sign up.
Rebecca Krinke: Professor, Landscape Architecture, College of Design, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Ports Festival of History
The fourth annual Twin Ports Festival of History runs throughout April 2025 at multiple venues in Duluth and Superior. The event serves the diverse communities of Northeastern Minnesota and Northwestern Wisconsin. The Festival shares lectures, artifacts, tours, performances, events and multimedia exhibits with the public to encourage participants to reflect upon and share their heritage. The Festival creates opportunities to listen and discuss topics with authors and historians of local, regional, national and international renown. View schedule.
Steven Matthews: Associate Professor, History, Political Science, and International Studies; College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Science; University of Minnesota Duluth
Royal Shakespeare Company Residency
In Spring 2025, Theatre Arts and Dance will welcome artists from the Royal Shakespeare Company for a five-day residency. The RSC is recognized globally for its daring and diverse productions, its reimagination of the Shakespearean legacy, and its world-class training programs that serve more than half a million young people and adults. We plan a series of public-facing events, including a masterclass, training workshop, design panel, and screening to make the artistry of this dynamic company available to the broader Twin Cities performing arts community. The goal is to spur dialogue about race, relevance, and activism in producing Shakespeare; offer a unique training opportunity to colleagues from less resourced institutions, including K-12 educators; disseminate theatrical techniques that enhance the accessibility of Shakespearean texts; and build community with arts non-profits in the Twin Cities.
Margaret Werry: Associate Professor, Theatre Arts and Dance, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities