What is AIAR?

Bring your creativity, explore across disciplines, and utilize the arts to positively impact the world around you. 

How can music support public health? What can dance teach us about wellness? How might visual arts inform neuroscience or expand possibilities in disability education? In the University of Arizona’s Applied Intercultural Arts Research (AIAR) graduate program, questions like these become starting points for research, collaboration, and creative discovery.

AIAR brings together students and scholars working across music, dance, theater, film, visual arts, and other artistic cultural practices. You’ll connect an artistic area of focus with a secondary field outside the arts, building a research path around the questions and communities that matter to you. These connections open possibilities across the humanities and the social, health, and natural sciences—from psychology and music to archival studies and environmental sustainability.

Explore across cultures. Learn through collaboration.

With foundations in ethnomusicology, AIAR emphasizes intercultural, ethnographic, and arts-based research. You’ll develop skills to learn with communities, engage with diverse cultural perspectives, and collaborate across disciplines and professions. Throughout the program, you’ll consider how culture shapes artistic practices, and how those practices can help us understand and respond to complex issues.

Turn your research into meaningful work.

AIAR invites you to imagine what the arts can do in classrooms, community organizations, healthcare settings, public spaces, and beyond. Whether your interests center on health and well-being, education, environmental sustainability, or other community priorities, you’ll explore how research and creative practice can inform one another and contribute to the world around you.

Established in 2018 as the first Graduate Interdisciplinary Program designed in collaboration with the University of Arizona College of Fine Arts, AIAR prepares students for careers in interdisciplinary academic research and applied work in the public sector.

Where could interdisciplinary arts-based research take you?