The Arizona Women’s Collaborative is a group of women and non-binary artists working synergistically across disciplines. Through cooperative composition, AWC seeks to foster opportunities for artists from different fields—including creative writing, dance, music, and the visual arts—to use their creative expression for positive change. In this spirit, AWCis facilitating cross-disciplinary partnerships between student-artists, alumni, and faculty, beginning by pairing students from the nationally ranked MFA Program in Creative Writing with DMA students in Music Composition and Music Performance. In recognition of the traditional underrepresentation of women in the fields of music composition and poetry and choreography. The arts ask us to tap into creativity and activate a skillset that can only enhance all other aspects of learning—one of the most critical being a capacity to open ourselves to other perspectives, attitudes, and approaches, and to join conversations with the ability to consider thoughtfully opinions that are not our own. Through this experience we gain understanding we did not previously have, and through our increased understanding, we become capable of greater empathy. Participation in the arts, in short, opens us. Through this project, the AWC will create interactions at multiple levels of community—artists to artist, artists to audience, and audience in reply to artists—offering all involved, creator or viewer, an opportunity to grow through shared experience.
To date we have held three concerts and premiered 17 new works from ASU students, alumni and the Southwest region.
