Welcome from the Dean
A few weeks ago, on the evening of October 3, I was invited to speak at an extraordinary event at a new UVM venue. It’s a building many of you walked past during your UVM days, and may never have noticed. Since the 1930s, the Elihu B. Taft School, on the corner of South Williams and Pearl Streets, served many generations of Burlington elementary school children. On October 3rd, 2018, the building formally began a second life as the nexus for the arts at UVM: the Michele and Martin Cohen Hall for the Integrative Creative Arts.
Inside, the building was bursting at the seams with creative energy—we were treated to several stunning performances by UVM faculty and students from the music and dance departments. The hallways were lined with video kiosks showing videos produced by students from the film and television studies department. The evening seemed to perfectly capture the possibilities of collaboration between different art forms, a phenomenon CAS Dean Kelley Di Dio likes to call “creative collision.”
None of this would have been possible without the vision and generosity of Michele Resnick Cohen, UVM ’72, and her husband Martin Cohen. They made several gifts totaling $7 million to transform the building into a true home for the arts at UVM. We are truly grateful for the Cohen’s commitment—they have provided an exciting new laboratory for experimenting with the fine and performing arts.
We’ve always had world-class teaching, research and creative work in the arts—our faculty in music, dance, theater, studio art, art history and film are nationally recognized scholars. And our students have produced work of national acclaim and have gone on to remarkable careers.
Today, the Michele and Martin Cohen Hall for the Integrative Creative Arts creates physical spaces commensurate with the quality of the arts in the College and at UVM. We look forward to witnessing many new creative collaborations in the coming years!
Bill Falls
Dean of Arts and Sciences
