Welcome to UVA Arts
UVA Arts empowers a community committed to creativity, discovery, curiosity, and service, providing a highly engaging and unique experience for students, faculty, and community members. Led by Vice Provost for the Arts, we foster this community by facilitating opportunities for innovative research, captivating performances, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and artistic excellence. The Fralin Museum of Art, Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, the Virginia Film Festival, Heritage Theatre Festival, & WTJU are just a few of the rich, diverse programs that we support and represent.
We believe that a strong and vibrant arts landscape enriches each student’s University experience and lifelong learning and serves as an important bridge between UVA and the Charlottesville community. You can support this mission by contributing annually to the UVA Arts Fund for Artistic Excellence, joining the Arts Council, or amplifying your impact with the Arts Endowment.
Photo by Ézé Amos
President James E. Ryan, University of Virginia
“I think the Arts speak to the full range of the human condition, which is on vivid display right now, sorrow and joy, tragedy and triumph, selfishness and selflessness, and it’s a time for us, through the Arts, I think to connect as a community because the Arts remind us of the transcendent and the enduring.”
Photo by Coe Sweet
UVA Arts Fund for Artistic Excellence
Annual Giving to the Arts
During COVID-19, the Artistic Excellence Fund is the most advantageous and direct way to support the key priorities of Arts across the entire University.
These unrestricted, current-use funds allow the Vice Provost for the Arts, Jody Kielbasa, to address the urgent and unanticipated needs created by COVID-19, as well as, high-quality projects and arts initiatives for students and faculty. Support for the annual fund is the most direct and impactful way to bolster the arts at UVA and ensure the arts are accessible to students, our University community, Charlottesville, and beyond
Yinimala Gumana and Wukun Wanambi, Yolngu artists from Yirrkala, Northern Territory, Australia, perform traditional Yolngu songs during a special event at Kluge-Ruhe in September 2017.
Arts Council Membership
UVA’s Arts Council is a membership based advisory and financial support group of alumni, friends, and parents that support grants from UVA Arts students, faculty, and departments across grounds. Members meet on Grounds or virtually twice annually with the Vice Provost for the Arts, arts faculty, and students to strengthen collaboration within the University arts community and encourage participation in the collective programs offered. Membership is secured through a nominations process for interested individuals who make a gift of $2,500 or more to the Arts Council. The Arts Council sponsors an annual grants program which provides awards up to $10,000 to arts projects across Grounds.
Arts Council members enjoyed a private tour of the newly-restored Rotunda and the Lawn following their fall 2017 meeting.
Photo by Dan Addison
Arts Endowment: Sustaining the Future for UVA Arts
Established in 2014, the Arts Endowment provides sustainable funding for high-impact arts projects that place creativity at the core of learning and teaching across the University, thereby enhancing the University’s profile as a leader in arts learning, teaching, and service. Individuals who make a gift to the Arts Endowment of $100,000 or more are invited to serve a five-year trustee term to advise the Office of the Provost on the use and strategic investment of endowment earnings.
Funds from the Arts Endowment supported multimedia sculptural installation of sometimes.we.cannot.be.with.our.bodies. by Vanessa German at The Fralin Museum of Art February to June of 2019. Pictured is Vanessa German in the Rotunda Dome Room, making poems, one on one, for students.
Jody Kielbasa, Vice Provost for the Arts and Director, Virginia Film Festival University of Virginia
“UVA Arts support students, faculty, facilities and programs and seeks to elevate those assets to a level where no student leaves UVA without having experienced the arts, and where the University is as well known for arts and creativity as for anything else.”
