Founded in 2023 under the leadership of Professor Emeritus Kathy Schwab, the Fairfield Arts Institute serves to create and sponsor opportunities for Fairfield students to engage and experiment with the arts, broadly defined.
The Arts Institute curates and funds three to four annual arts excursions to New York City, including recent trips to The Metropolitan Opera, The Natural History Museum, and The Joyce Theatre. Additionally, the Institute is committed to co-sponsoring inclusionary events across campus where students can explore a variety of new art forms through participation, collaboration, reception, and patronage. These events may include performances, concerts, lectures, workshops, exhibitions, master classes, conversations and virtual networking.
Faculty and staff are also given opportunities for training and mentorship with a goal to build a constellation of art-based learning across disciplines, departments, schools, the greater Fairfield community and beyond. We work closely with The Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts and the Fairfield University Art Museum, two excellent on-campus facilities with full annual programming that serve as a destination for the arts in southwestern Connecticut.
The Arts Institute is managed by the Director with the aid of an Executive Committee, a Campus Committee of faculty, staff and students, and an External Committee of arts professionals and experts from across the nation.
At the Fairfield Arts Institute we are committed to curating, promoting, creating, and critically discussing work that gives the entire community unique opportunities to consider the inherent power of art to challenge perceptions. We seek to encourage respectful dialogue, and build new discourses that promote understanding, inclusion, equity, empathy and problem-solving.
The primary vision for my tenure as Director is inspired by the Jesuit tradition of “cura personalis,” or care for the whole person. This profound notion upholds the value of every person’s mind, body, and spirit, and I hope to continue growing the Institute as a site of collective humanity that actively promotes work and engagement for the greater good and the development of a society that is creative, inspired, and just.
Sean F. Edgecomb, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Theatre and WGSS
Director of the Fairfield University Arts Institute
