BIG GIVE 2026

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March 12, 2026

Calling all creatives! 

For 25 years, the Arts Research Center has been a vital part of UC Berkeley's arts constellation. This Big Give, you can help add new light to our collective. Your gift will directly empower and uplift arts students and faculty across the Berkeley landscape, along with creative makers in the dozens of departments we work with across campus. ARC's programming is designed to create community, support making, inspire thinking through the arts, mentor students and faculty alike, prioritize conversation, forefront collaboration, fuel the imagination, build research archives, and underwrite the gift of time and space for arts development. All in service to creating new worlds and scholarship that prioritize the senses.

Help support the only research unit at UC Berkeley devoted exclusively to the arts.

Your gift, of any size, matters. 
Support arts research today. 

(Or any day. But today would be awesome.)

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Arts Research Center Fund

Support Fund

Mission

The Arts Research Center is a hub and a meeting place, a space for reflection where artists, scholars, curators, and civic arts leaders from a variety of disciplines can gather and learn from one another. ARC serves as an incubator for new research and artistic experimentation, as a nexus for students, faculty, and art professionals, and as an advocate that champions the arts on & off campus. ARC advances and also challenges the interdisciplinary ethos in contemporary art practice by bringing innovators in the fields of visual art, dance, theatre, music, performance, architecture, art history, film, media, creative writing, photography, public art, and social practice into dialogue and debate.

arts.berkeley.edu

Questions? Please reach out to Associate Director Laurie Macfee (macfee at berkeley.edu), and note Big Give in the subject line of your email. 

YOUR BIG GIVE WILL HELP FUND:

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Arts Development Grants

Making art = arts research. Open to undergraduate and graduate students, LIFT grants fund specific creative arts projects and research, including attending workshops & conferences, performance or exhibit costs, collaborations, materials, and publication. ARC also offers LOFT grants to support early project development for arts faculty. This year, ARC awarded 20 grants in 12 depts across four divisions – and could have easily quadrupled that for talented applicants with need. Help support future makers today.

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The Loft Hour

Conversations = arts research. Interdisciplinary lunch hour conversations allow students to meet and explore the work of the newest faculty members of the Berkeley arts constellation. Once a month, three faculty makers across the arts spectrum share their work, which we archive for students and the public, in perpetuity.

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Lectures with Visiting Artists & Writers

Sharing inspiration = arts research. ARC curates, presents, and co-sponsors a yearly season of visiting artist and writer events, in coordination with our many partners on campus. These offer students the opportunity to interact with and hear from renowned creatives across the arts, like our upcoming visit with poet Layli Long Soldier, and are free & open to the public. Hundreds of lectures including with Jeffrey Gibson, Julie Mehretu, Joy Harjo, Cara Romero, and more can be found in our events archive.

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Artists-in-Residence

Studio time = arts research. Each year, ARC invites an artist to campus for an extended period to explore a project in dedicated studio time, work with students in class or art studio visits, and present their work in a public forum. Over the past 25 years, ARC has been honored welcome 30 artists, writers, composers, directors, playwrights, filmmakers, musicians, and choreographers to campus.

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Indigenous Performing Arts Residency

Collaboration + stories = arts research. The IPAR program is a collaboration of ARC with the Dept of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies to create ongoing financial and material support for upcoming Indigenous performing artists so that Native stories can be told for students on our campus now and into the future. This spring features dancer & choreographer Sam Aros-Mitchell, who will teach masterclasses and give a performance along with studio time.

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Fellowships

Mentorship community = arts research. ARC's Fellows Program advances interdisciplinary research in the arts at Berkeley by supporting student, faculty, and occasionally community fellows as they pursue semester-long projects. Since 2009, 187 fellows have been chosen from over 48 depts on campus. The goals are to: encourage collaboration across disciplines, depts, and colleges; cultivate a community of artists and arts scholars with interdisciplinary interests; develop a climate of shared mentorship for both faculty and student research; pilot projects; and provide the gift of time and space critical to conducting arts research.

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Research Archives

Repositories = arts research. ARC's archives capture the diverse dialogues and scholarship among artists, scholars, and leaders from various disciplines, embodying ARC's role as a nexus for interdisciplinary exploration and innovation at Berkeley, and aligning with our mission to foster reflection and learning among diverse communities. These repositories advance cross-disciplinary art practice and research, and include a directory of over 700 artists and scholars who have worked with ARC cross-listed with their presentations, plus event, video, and blog archives – an ongoing research tool for students, faculty, and the art community at large.

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Why give to ARC – we are nimble, enthusiastic, committed, do a lot with a little, have no endowment but 25 years of history, good will, beautiful offerings from incredible people, and luck. Your gift will matter.