Launched in 2001 with a mission to promote diversity in the arts from a community-based approach, The Institute for Diversity in the Arts (IDA) has involved over 150 students in courses and workshops, both affirming the value and expanding the role of the arts in society.

We have established a major course of study within the Center for Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), an interdisciplinary program at Stanford. The IDA concentration is designed to bring the artistic process of inquiry, discovery, and expression into the study of race, culture and identity. Now students can major in IDA, gain practical production and performance skills, and merge their creative and academic lives.

At the heart of what we do in our annual artists residency project, Creative Works, Creating Change is work with artists. Socially committed artists of national and international reputation come to the Stanford campus each winter to teach workshops with students on their particular art form. Significant components of these IDA workshops have been the interaction of art with the community and an exploration of how art can function as a mechanism of social inquiry. These workshops help Stanford students to develop as artists but also to understand their place in an ever increasing global environment.

We purposefully teach students that art can build cultural bridges or can confront critical issues in ways that other social or political processes are often unable to do.

We intend to continue and expand our visiting artist workshop program into the fabric of Stanford and to affirm the unique agency that the arts can provide as we face the challenges of our rapidly changing, global reality.