CURRICULUM

During the summer, the students in the Innovation Studio are the friendly faces you will find facilitating workshops with the NOI fellows or in the Innovation Corner during performances! They serve as design coaches to help NOI fellows think outside the box on elements to incorporate into their performances, help facilitate audience and NOI fellow interactions in the lobby, and designs artifacts and more for events such as the Chamber 2.0 concert.

This interdisciplinary group changes each summer and works closely with Mira Azarm and Christina Hnatov to bring their ideas to the Festival! 

While the specifics of the work we do each summer changes, it is guided by three key priorities:

Activating Musicians as Designers,

Building Community with Audiences & Musicians,

and

Experiential Learning for Students

Many UMD students in the performing and visual arts find it challenging to create fruitful partnerships across disciplines. When they do collaborate, it's all too common to experience friction during the process, navigating different expectations, techniques, terminology, and cultures. With that context as the premise, this class was designed to address these particular questions:

• How might we make meeting and getting to know each other easier (even within the same building!)?

• How might we offer a space where collaboration can be productive and impactful?

• How might we use design tools, mindsets, and behaviors to incorporate principles of audience and community engagement in our areas of practice?

Many years of successful collaboration between the Academy for Innovation & Entrepreneurship and the National Orchestral Institute + Festival have led us to believe that these types of opportunities can be designed. And that we can have a blast doing it.