a2ru emerging creatives student summit

Resonate: Making Waves

March 16-19, 2025
Georgia Tech, Atlanta

How can our ideas resonate? Waves can be immediate and intense, like an earthquake; or they can accumulate through reverberations over time, like the actions of 1960s civil rights leaders.

Together, participants will explore waves – their wake, momentum, and impact. From the atomic to the emotional to the artistic to the cultural to the galactic, how can we make waves today?

Each year, the a2ru Emerging Creatives Student Summit brings together undergraduate and graduate students representing a myriad of disciplines from across the a2ru network of higher education institutions.

Emerging Creatives is a three-day collaborative experience in which students form small cross-disciplinary teams to explore a specific area of the Summit’s theme. Over the course of the event, teams make something that represents their exploration: a syllabus, cookbook, podcast, app, opera, pair of shoes, urban blueprint, pop-up store, musical score, website… the list of possible outcomes is endless.

At Emerging Creatives, students not only envision and create their project; they also take field trips, meet extraordinary interdisciplinary thinkers, practice presenting their work, and exchange ideas about their project with peers and experts. Students also build collaboration skills in micro-workshops with a2ru staff.

Student participants are nominated by their home institutions, which may send up to four students each. Delegations from each school are split evenly between those from arts and non-arts disciplines.

ArtsEngine is accepting applications to select 4 students (evenly split between arts-based disciplines and non-arts-based disciplines) to represent the University of Michigan at the 2025 Summit.

U-M students will work with students from other a2ru partner institutions during the summit. Applicants will be notified within one week of the deadline to allow time to make travel arrangements. Selected students are encouraged to apply for funding through the a2ru student travel grant or a2ru scholar awards

Applications are due January 30, 2025 and must include at least one letter of support from a U-M faculty member.