Course Overview

This course will feature what Lawrence does best – a multitude of disciplines working in collaborative and creative ways to explore different ways of knowing, thinking, expressing, feeling and being.

You will achieve artistic expression through collaborative efforts, honing your own skills while learning from and benefiting from the opportunity to work with and learn from instructors and peers from different artistic backgrounds. In creating art with collaborators, the hope is that you can expand your own artistry while contributing positively to the group's efforts.

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Guests relax on the deck of the main lodge during a 2019 summer seminar at Bjorklunden.

Key Facts

Credits: 6
Dates: July 12, 2026 - August 1, 2026
Locations: Appleton, Björklunden, London
Areas of Study: Fine Arts, Music, Visual Arts, and Dance

Application Fee: $300

Tentative Schedule

Weeks 1 - 3

Location: Appleton Campus, Björklunden, and London

Sample Daily Schedule:

The three instructors, representing music, visual art and dance/movement, will alternate leading morning sessions and work with collaborative groupings of students in the afternoons.

Morning: 

Full group sessions led by instructors. Topics may include but are not limited to creative practice, improvisation, practice/routine, collaborative models, performance anxiety, listening/seeing/moving, career/professional options, and others.

Afternoon:

Collaborative group project work. Combining students in a variety of groupings to create, produce and ultimately “perform” works. While student-created and improvised works will be emphasized, usage and borrowing of existing works of music, art, dance, poetry, theater, etc. will be utilized when appropriate.

Get to Know Your Professors

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Andy Mast

Andy Mast, currently the Associate Dean of the Lawrence University Conservatory of Music and the Kimberly-Clark Professor of Music, takes a variety of paths to creativity and musicianship. Arriving at Lawrence in 2004 as the Director of Bands, he spent the first part of his career curious about issues and topics relating to conducting, ensemble/group dynamics and the history and repertoire of the wind band.

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Rob Neilson

Rob Neilson is the Frederick R. Layton Professor of Studio Art and Professor of Art. Born and raised in Detroit, he received a BFA in Fine Arts from the College for Creative Studies and an MFA in Sculpture from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Rob has exhibited his sculpture, installations, and drawings at galleries, museums, and alternative spaces nationally and internationally.

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Mauriah Donegan Kraker

Mauriah Donegan Kraker is a midwesterner, a collaborative performance maker, a long-distance walker primarily invested in slow travel: walking around the block and through the city as a means of attending to choreographic unfolding of time cycles in the body + land. Her movement practices are shaped by her time competing as an Olympic-level athlete and touring with Pilobolus Dance Company; endurance, duration + precise framing of body/land are drivers in the creation of place-based works.