Impact through Innovation Hub launched in College of Performing and Visual Arts
The starving-artist trope needs an update. Artists are imbued with the creative drive needed to launch successful careers, an essential element they come to UNC Greensboro’s College of Visual and Performing Arts (CVPA) to develop and augment. This winter, Innovate UNCG launched a new Impact through Innovation (ITI) Hub in CVPA to further foster a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship within artistic disciplines.
Four faculty fellows from each of CVPA’s departments – art, music, dance, and theater – were tapped to help build a course that teaches strategic skills in business and entrepreneurship.
“If we are training students in the arts, we need to give them business skills as well. Otherwise, we’re sending them out unprepared,” says Hannah Grannemann, Director of Arts Administration and CVPA ITI Faculty Fellow. “Artists can’t get their work seen and sold in the world if they don’t have entrepreneurial skills and confidence.”
Training the whole artist
A successful business, much like a work of art, starts with a great idea. Fostering that idea and thinking through what to do with it, who it will serve, how to get it to a receptive audience and encourage them to consume it is where entrepreneurship comes in.
Grannemann is collaborating with CVPA ITI Hub Faculty Fellows Marielis Garcia, Stephanie Ycaza, and Anna Dulba-Barnett to develop a new course that will be available to juniors and seniors in Fall 2025. The class will cover personal branding, business strategy, understanding audiences, marketing, and distribution channels.
“Our highest goal is to help our students understand that making art and entrepreneurship go hand-in-hand,” says Grannemann. “These skills give them agency to choose their own career paths.”
As a collaborative unit, the hub fellows are focused on understanding what the artists need to embrace innovation.
“You can’t be an artist in the world and be siloed. We must be willing to look at our art through multiple mediums to get a full scope of what is possible,” says Garcia. “It’s in that process of talking, writing, creating works together that students will find comfort with experimenting and the willingness to try.”
The entrepreneurial mindset breeds resilience, a skill the fellows hope to develop in their students. It takes practice, it takes process, and it takes patience to have a great idea and bring it to fruition.
“There’s value in the process of doing the work,” Garcia says. “The earlier the students embrace that process – showing up to class, thinking about the work, experimenting, failing, and starting again – the more skilled they’ll become at practicing whatever their version is of creating.”
Nonlinear paths for nonlinear thinkers
An essential element of the new course will be regular appearances by guest speakers to lead workshops aimed at illustrating how experimental thinking can lead to success. The hub fellows plan to bring in CVPA alumni and artists both local and national.
“We have been charged to involve alumni and the community and arts community locally, regionally, nationally,” says Grannemann. “When a student sees someone who went to their own school, it helps them to have more confidence that they can make it, too.”
Many artists have nonlinear paths to success. Much like entrepreneurs, they start with a clear vision of the impact they want to make, then identify who they want to impact, and create channels for distribution of their work.
“Artists are small businesses,” says Grannemann. “They know they can’t make more art if they don’t have food in the fridge, a roof over their heads and enough mental space to create. This course is designed to help make them create a sustainable model for supporting themselves.”
Open to students from the four CVPA departments of music, dance, theatre, and art, the course will also breed opportunities for them to form new perspectives and collaborations.
“When you speak to another artist about something you’re interested in, there’s usually some shared space with things they’re working on,” says Garcia. “There’s value in exploring how those ideas coexist to create something that you just didn’t even imagine could be possible. Those opportunities to collaborate affect that entrepreneurial mindset because it really creates a sense of autonomy and proactivity as they discover the steps they need to do to create that new idea.”
Campus-wide entrepreneurship
The CVPA ITI Hub is the latest effort by Innovate UNCG, joining established hubs in the School of Education and the School of Health and Human Sciences. It will be part of an interdisciplinary network of innovators across campus.
“Every discipline has their own jargon, their own set of priorities, their own curriculum,” said Dr. John Borchert, Social Innovation and Public Scholarship Lead for Innovate UNCG. “The hub is designed to create platforms unique to CVPA students’ ambitions that will raise awareness and build infrastructure that encourages the innovation and entrepreneurship necessary for careers in the arts.”
Through Innovate UNCG, the hubs bring innovative faculty across campus together to explore strategies for taking ideas to scale. The goal is for researchers, students, and faculties in all disciplines to consider social innovation and social entrepreneurship to be essential elements as they work to address challenges in their fields.
“To have a viable and flourishing career as an artist in the 21st Century, you need a diverse and dynamic skillset,” Borchert says. “The CVPA ITI Hub is about developing an entrepreneurial mindset. We want to meet our students where they are in terms of their interests and skills and then build a bridge to empower them to have agency and ownership over their own pathway, whatever it might be.”
Photography by Sean Norona
Story by Alice Manning Touchette
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