As autumn comes to a close, I take this moment to stop, reflect on, and share with you the exciting and inspiring stories about the Eskenazi School’s faculty, staff, and students that you’ll find across our news site. We had a successful semester full of challenging classes, beautiful exhibitions, insightful lectures, and revitalizing experiences with visiting artists.

At the same time, our world, and our nation continue to struggle with the short- and long-term effects of this ongoing pandemic, now a tridemic. The challenges we work together to address are growing in number and complexity. Whether on our campus, in our community, or globally, the arts and creativity are vital to solving such problems. Our times demand that higher education, and our specific disciplines, play a central role in producing positive and transformative solutions – this work has never been more relevant, substantive, or significant. We will move into the spring of 2023 with a continuing commitment to enhance and enrich our community while innovating and evolving for our future students.

As we do so, our Eskenazi School Strategic Plan for 2025 guides us. We are more than halfway through its implementation and are now engaging in a campus-wide process for a new IU Bloomington strategic plan. Our goals to foster excellence in research and creative activity, make our school a great place to work and learn, enrich our student learning and preparation, connect and engage with our community, and strive for inclusion, diversity, equity, and access, continue to be at the forefront of our discussions and attention. A commitment to these goals is vital to the development of our school.

As our mission states, “we are the nexus of art, architecture, design, and merchandising at Indiana’s flagship university – advancing research, creative activity, and education in our state and beyond. As a transdisciplinary community of ethical leaders, we embrace the liberal arts, encourage risk-taking, inspire innovation, and fuel creativity in a complex world.”

I’d like to thank the entire Eskenazi School community for their innovation and dedication to this mission. As you will find on our school news and faculty work and research pages, our faculty, staff, and students continue to move their research, creative activity, teaching, learning, and service forward in powerful ways.

I wish you and yours a wonderful and restorative holiday season, and hope that you please stay in touch with us.

Health and peace,

Peg Faimon

Founding Dean and Professor