Curb Center For Art Enterprise And Public Policy

  • Vanderbilt University

    Transcending language and borders: How the NIRMA Project is expanding Nashville’s identity as Music City

    On the evening of Nov. 6, the gallery rooms and halls of the Curb Center at Vanderbilt will resound with a global melody. There will be the pluck and ring of a setar and the charm of a santoor as the Nashville Immigrant and Refugee Music and Art Project will visit to perform their showcase “Melodies of Crossing: An Immersive Night of Global Music Across Rooms.” A collective of immigrant and refugee musicians from Iran, Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Egypt, Venezuela and Nashville will settle into the Curb Center’s gallery space at 1801 Edgehill Ave. and play music from their native lands.   Read More

    Oct 27, 2025

  • Vanderbilt University

    Transatlantic collaboration: Vanderbilt, Liverpool award first joint research seed grants

    Vanderbilt University and England’s University of Liverpool have announced the inaugural recipients of a new joint seed grant program, which supports faculty teams pursuing innovative projects designed to grow into larger collaborations and external funding.  Read More

    Sep 4, 2025

  • Vanderbilt University

    Curb Center exhibit HAGOOD showcases work by Lanecia Rouse and Ciona Rouse

    HAGOOD finds visual artist Lanecia Rouse collaborating with her sister, poet Ciona Rouse, to explore their matrilineal line, in search of the softness and steel of the long line of women that carried them into the world. Read More

    Sep 2, 2025

  • Vanderbilt University

    The Curb Center welcomes five new Curb Scholars

    The Curb Scholars program at The Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy is taking on five new undergraduate students this semester. This program, inspired by the life and career of songwriter and entertainment figure Mike Curb, rewards students working in a variety of artistic spaces. Read More

    Aug 13, 2025

  • Vanderbilt University

    Applications now open for the Curb Center’s 2025–26 Creative Inquiry Grants

    The Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy at Vanderbilt has awarded nearly $80,000 over the past academic year to undergraduates, graduate students, faculty and staff pursuing community-facing arts-based projects. This is triple the impact of previous iterations of this program, spurred by new application procedures, outreach and project development methods. Creative Inquiry Grants, named for the Curb Center’s goal of elevating art as a mode of inquiry, award up to $2,500 per applicant and the use of Curb Center space and resources to the stewards of a variety of important projects. Read More

    Jul 21, 2025

  • Vanderbilt University

    Collaboration between the Curb Center and Forklift Danceworks generates meaningful conversations with campus facilities and dining workers

    A university requires more than professors, administrators and students to run properly. The preparation of food, maintenance and cleaning of facilities, landscaping and groundskeeping work, and thousands of other essential tasks build the foundation of every place of learning. Even so, conversations between these two worlds can be rare, and when they do occur, might be scaffolded by hierarchical ideas about work. One program, sponsored by the Curb Center in collaboration with Forklift Danceworks, seeks to change this.  Read More

    Jul 8, 2025

  • Vanderbilt University

    Creator of ‘The Jonah People’ Hannibal Lokumbe to visit campus

    The Curb Center at Vanderbilt and Belmont University are sponsoring composer and musician Hannibal Lokumbe’s visit to Nashville this April. He will be speaking with courses, giving a talk alongside his biographer Lauren Coyle Rosen, and working with the Vanderbilt 16 on their performance of two movements of his piece “In The Spirit of Being.”  Read More

    Apr 8, 2025

  • Vanderbilt University

    Memoirist and filmmaker Jennifer Baum to visit Vanderbilt April 3–4

    Baum will be visiting Vanderbilt on April 3–4, visiting courses and giving a public talk about her new memoir as a part of The Curb Center’s spring semester programming theme: Art and Democracy. Read More

    Mar 31, 2025

  • Vanderbilt University

    Robert Shetterly, artist behind Americans Who Tell the Truth portrait series, to speak at the Curb Center for Art and Public Policy March 19

    As part of the Curb Center’s spring programming theme “Art and Democracy,” painter Robert Shetterly will be visiting Vanderbilt courses and giving a talk with senior lecturer Jack Crawford during the week of March 17. Read More

    Mar 5, 2025

  • Vanderbilt University

    Student team uses AI and filmmaking to inspire change

    See how a group of Vanderbilt student storytellers are weaving AI and imagination to inspire transformational change. Read More

    Mar 4, 2025

  • Vanderbilt University

    Second weekend of Eco-Grief Performance Project showing Oct. 17–20

    Another exciting weekend of performances exploring emotional responses to climate change will be the final event this semester sponsored by the Vanderbilt Eco-Grief Initiative. Experience mascots come to life, a revival of a beloved 1990s cartoon, a very tense focus group and some old-fashioned school spirit in these two plays developed in conversation with the Vanderbilt community.   Read More

    Oct 14, 2024

  • Vanderbilt University

    First two plays of the Eco-Grief Performance Project showing this weekend, Sept. 26–29

    Commissioned by the Eco-Grief Performance Project, a collaborative effort of the Science and Media Grand Challenge, the Theatre Department and the Curb Center, two plays are being performed Sept. 26-19; these works are expressions of complex emotions brought on by living in a changing climate. Read More

    Sep 24, 2024

  • Vanderbilt University

    Extraction/Interaction, the Curb Center’s fall exhibition, opens Sept. 9

    Acid mine drainage. Digitally printed legal documents. Drone photographs. Core samples. Appalachian bituminous coal. The artists represented in Extraction/Interaction—the Curb Center’s fall exhibition—use these and other materials to create bodies of work that galvanize responses and resistance to the climate crisis. Featuring the work of Will Wilson, Eliza Evans and John Sabraw, Extraction/Interaction considers how climate grief can transform artistic practice into a mechanism for positive environmental impact.   Read More

    Sep 4, 2024

  • Vanderbilt University

    Applications for Curb Center funding now open

    Available to graduate students across disciplines, the Curb Public Scholars Program provides a two-year grant of $2,500 for public-facing creative projects, while the Creative Inquiry Grant Program awards various levels of funding ranging from $500 to $2,500 and is open to undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty and staff. Read More

    Aug 26, 2024

  • Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy at Vanderbilt

    Curb Scholars Program welcomes five new scholars

    The Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy has selected three incoming first-year students and two rising sophomore students for the Curb Scholars Program in Creative Enterprise and Public Leadership. Read More

    Aug 19, 2024

  • Vanderbilt University

    Imagining Wholeness uplifts experiences of cancer and community through the expressive arts

    Imagining Wholeness is a culminating showcase of works of expressive art created by participants in the Express Yourself writing workshops at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center and in visual art workshops hosted collaboratively by the Curb Center and Gilda’s Club Middle Tennessee.   Read More

    May 20, 2024

  • Vanderbilt University

    2023–24 Curb Scholars present their work in ‘Art as Protest’

    The Curb Center for Art, Enterprise & Public Policy is pleased to announce Art as Protest, the culminating showcase of creative projects by this year’s cohort of Curb Scholars. On Monday, April 1, 7–9:30 p.m. at the Sarratt Student Center Cinema and Gallery, Curb Scholars will present work spanning visual art, dance, film, fiber arts and creative writing. Each piece offers a unique interpretation of “art as protest”—the theme they have been investigating throughout this academic year. Read More

    Mar 27, 2024

  • Vanderbilt University

    Curb Center launches Vanderbilt Eco-Grief Initiative

    The Curb Center is pleased to announce the Vanderbilt Eco-Grief Initiative, a yearlong collaborative project that will use art as a tool to investigate the complex set of emotions—sorrow, guilt, terror, complicity and a range of others—that come to mind as we contemplate our changing climate and witness its effects on earthly life. By engaging artists working in a range of disciplines—theater, creative writing and the visual arts—the Curb Center aims to highlight creative work that confronts the emotional dimensions of climate change with the hope that true emotional reckoning might serve as an avenue to candid dialogue, innovation and lasting impact. Read More

    Jan 26, 2024

  • Vanderbilt University

    Allison Orr, choreographer and founder of Forklift Danceworks, in residence at the Curb Center

    Choreographer Allison Orr is visiting Vanderbilt for a weeklong residency at the Curb Center, during which she will be speaking to several classes and leading a community dance workshop in partnership with dance nonprofit New Dialect. Additionally, Orr will offer a public talk on her new book, DanceWorks: Stories of Creative Collaboration at Central Library on Thursday, Oct. 12 from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. Read More

    Oct 9, 2023