NYUAD ARTS CENTER
In 2013, THE OFFICE was engaged by New York University Abu Dhabi to create a Strategic Business, Artistic and Operational Plan for its yet-to-be-built NYUAD Arts Center. The entire NYUAD campus was still under construction when we began this multi-year project. During the process, we wrote the mission, oversaw the executive search and helped build the initial staff. We embarked on creating a report with an elevated concept of what an arts center of the scale and nature of NYUAD’s could be. Our route to discovering the best models to help NYUAD realize this vision was a fact-finding mission that produced an expansive but focused compendium of information which empowered NYUAD to create an Arts Center that exceeded all expectations. Our plan included the requisite information on best practices at comparative institutions; wish lists from an array of stakeholders including students, faculty, administrators, artists, and local and regional cultural players; and multiple financial and operational models encompassing staffing, programming, and production. As crucially, THE OFFICE put these data into context for NYUAD, synthesizing our findings into a set of clear and concise recommendations. In short, our report provided both the tools to create a world-class university arts center and the instructions for using them.
Enter the Dragon with Karsh Kale, 2009, New Zealand
Our goal was to help imagine an arts center that is more than a success in its own right: we aimed to outline a blueprint that could be used at other NYU campuses around the world. To this end, our report addressed the need for a clear and directive mission statement for the Arts Center that described an ideal and achievable relationship between the arts, scholarship, and community.
This mission positioned the Arts Center as a vibrant laboratory where innovative artists from throughout the Middle East and around the world come to perform, teach, and develop work.
The NYUAD Arts enter is a place where student and faculty productions are given the same technical and production support as visiting professional companies, where workshops, internships, and job training initiatives bring Emiratis to the NYUAD campus for meaningful interaction, and where the NYUAD and Abu Dhabi communities come to experience world class art and performance side by side.
Excerpt from our report:
”This model … will provide NYUAD with compelling programming that connects to the curriculum, using the arts to illuminate and enliven the scholarly pursuits of students and faculty. Key to this approach would be a series of events in theater, dance, film and music that can be used as teaching tools across campus. Works chosen will reflect and connect to the scholarship happening across campus. All artists in this series would visit classes, give artists talk and participate in appropriate Integrated Programming across disciplines. There will also be Artists Creative Labs supporting works in progress and providing students opportunities to see work being developed, learn about process, and work alongside master artists. These will include master classes, lectures and public open rehearsals/preview showings.
The NYUAD Arts Center aspires to be an internationally renowned performing arts center that presents student, faculty, and community productions alongside distinguished professional artists from around the world. As a place that both presents and develops work, the Arts Center will act as a vibrant laboratory for performance that fosters a dynamic relationship between the arts, scholarship, and community. It will serve NYUAD with compelling programming that connects to the curriculum, using the arts to illuminate and enliven the scholarly pursuits of students and faculty. It will host a range of public programs that draw residents of Abu Dhabi to the campus, animating and enriching the cultural life of both the city and the university through interaction. The NYUAD Arts Center will strive to be a beacon on the international arts landscape, firmly rooted in the region but with a global reach, all the while embedded in the university and welcoming Emiratis and the local community. Excellence, collaboration, creativity, accessibility, innovation, respect and understanding are the core values that govern NYUAD Arts Center.”
NYUAD Arts Center website
Bandaloop dance performance
