Creative Arts Across Disciplines (CAAD) is a new initiative at Vassar College funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation with the following primary goals:
- to foster opportunities for boundary-crossing artistic discovery and creation
- to broaden collaboration within the arts, as well as between the arts and other disciplines
- to enhance the impact and curricular tie-ins of visiting artist programs
- to deepen the engagement of Vassar students across the curriculum with methods and ideas from the arts
CAAD is an experimental laboratory for trying out new models of research, pedagogy, and practice, that foreground critical making and doing as complementary activities to critical thinking. CAAD programming is loosely organized around the senses, with 2014-15’s theme of “Vision,” 2015-16’s theme of “Sound,” and 2016-17’s theme of “Touch.”