Brown University Names Sydney Skybetter, New Faculty Director Of Brown Arts Institute

Brown University has named acclaimed choreographer and current Associate Professor, Sydney Skybetter, as the Faculty Director of the Brown Arts Institute.

Multifaceted artist, writer, and educator Sydney Skybetter has been teaching at Brown University for nearly a decade. As the founder of CRCI (The Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces), a conference that explores how choreography, computation, and surveillance meet, Skybetter comes at dance from an immensely interdisciplinary lens, particularly in an age of unprecedented technological advances. In his new directorial role, Skybetter wants to find balance between the risks of these technologies as well as their possible benefits:

"Between COVID, generative artificial intelligence, and any number of other tectonic disruptions, the global arts community faces unprecedented precarity and emergent opportunities. Our aim at the Brown Arts Institute is to support students, faculty, staff, artists and researchers' engagement with equitable creative practice right now so as to weigh positive interventions in the arts and international arts communities."

Skybetter has a clear vision for his role as BAI Faculty Director and the future of the arts at Brown: "The arts are both a means of expanding research in other disciplines and a research endeavor of themselves. The strength of Brown's academic life is scaffolded by our Open Curriculum and brightened by the presence of our exceptional artistic communities of practice; a community defined by its unique mixing of disciplines and research modalities, students with alumni, faculty and staff. The arts thrive at Brown. My aim is to ensure that every student on our campus, by the time they graduate, has not only been meaningfully exposed to the arts, but actively engaged in arts research. Being of service to art and supporting artists is, to my mind, an unabashedly utopian calling, a means to collectively imagine and endeavor to manifest a world we ourselves would want to live in. My intention for our work together then is to support the art, performances, collaborations, classes, research, affinities and communities that could only happen here; work for which the BAI is the best and maybe only place where a given endeavor is possible, work that is inconceivable but for our support, impossible any time but right now; creative matter that could be homed nowhere better than this place: the Brown Arts Institute."

Sydney's choreography has been performed at such venues as The Kennedy Center and Jacob's Pillow. He has lectured at the University of Cambridge, Yale, Mozilla and the Boston Dynamics AI Institute, and consulted for The National Ballet of Canada, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Hasbro, and The University of Southern California, among others. His work has been supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and a Creative Capital "Wild Futures" Award. He is a Senior Affiliate of metaLAB at Harvard University, a frequent contributor to WIRED and Dance Magazine, the Founder of the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces and Host of the podcast, "Dances with Robots." Sydney serves as the Faculty Director of the Brown Arts Institute, is an Associate Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, and was the first choreographer at Brown University to receive tenure.