Creativity Studio

Term: Fall 2025, Spring 2026

Instructors: Jim Ford, Yuko Taniguchi

Project description: 

Students examined genocides through historical scholarship and creative expression. They studied accounts alongside works produced by survivors to deepen their understanding of trauma, resistance and resilience. For their final project, students created “music boxes” to capture the wisdom and insights they gained. They explored how artistic choices such as symbolism, texture, color, sound and design can communicate the complex dimensions of historical trauma. Through this work, students showed how creativity can capture insights often difficult to express in conventional formats like research papers, making their historical learning personal and deeply meaningful.

Term:

Instructor: 

Project description: 

Students in BIOC 3721 created works of art that depict how 2024 FDA‑approved drugs function alongside the disease states they treat. Inspired by David Goodsell’s molecular illustrations, these landscapes represent the inner workings of the cell at a moment in time, with structures shown to accurate size, scale and concentration, with some creative freedoms taken. The aim is to blend scientific accuracy with artistic expression. Through the process of visualizing biomedicine, student‑artists deepened their understanding of complex scientific concepts and translated them into visual form, offering audiences a unique pathway into the invisible worlds of biomedicine.

Term:

Instructors: Rachel Olson and Micaela Haas

Project Description: 

As a capstone for the Mycology, Virology and Parasitology course, students selected a favorite organism or biological concept to transform into a visual story. Faculty strove to form a creative intersection where students bridge scientific discovery and artistic innovation. Utilizing a vibrant mix of media, from paintings and intricate beadwork to detailed 3D models, they translated complex cellular structures, life cycles, and scientific theories into tangible art. This hands-on, multi-sensory project offered a memorable, integrative way to conclude the semester, proving that scientific understanding and artistic expression naturally enrich one another.

Term:

Instructors: Marcia Nichols and Jen 

Project Description: 

As the culmination of a unit on Native American literature, students participated in an artistic workshop with scholar and artist Biiwaabik Hunt (Ho-Chunk, Ojibwe, Lakota). 

Biiwaabik designed a community mural featuring Ojibwe and Dakota design traditions and composed of individually-painted canvases. Together, they form a beautiful, collective work showcasing the importance of community and connection. 

Through this process, student-artists deepened their understanding of Minnesota tribes’ histories, artistic traditions and recognized the continued vitality and contributions of Native peoples.

Term:

Instructors: Yuko Taniguchi and Jered Bright

Project Description: 

As the signature final project for this course,  students contemplated their own well-being by exploring the following questions: 

• If a student's well-being were visible, what would it look like? 
• What is the shape of their well-being space? 
• What is the range of their well-being? 

The purpose of this project is to encourage students to think about the boundaries of their well-being. By representing well-being as a visible space, students can "see" where they stand in relation to it. A big focus of this course is to help students genuinely understand how it feels to be well, and from that place, to think about how they might help others.

Term: 

Instructors: Jered Bright, Elizabeth Dunens, Yuko Taniguchi 

Project Description: 

Students collaboratively develop, facilitate and evaluate creativity-based programs for students at the Alternative Learning Center (ALC). The course covers three core areas: designing effective content tailored to a target audience, facilitating diverse groups — from small discussions to large workshops — and evaluating program impact. Through this process, students build leadership, attentiveness, creativity and communication skills essential for navigating health care in the digital health era.

Term: Fall 2025

Instructor: Yuko Taniguchi

Project Description: Considering that many college students struggle with perfectionism, this first-year seminar examined the unhealthy habits that perfectionism could create and introduced a new approach: Wabi Sabi, a Japanese philosophy that recognizes the old, the broken and the imperfect as sources of character and wisdom. Through this framework, students explored how imperfection is not only natural but also essential, an important sign of authenticity and a key ingredient for creativity. 

To practice this concept, students followed step-by-step instructions to make origami flowers (a task perfectionists often want to execute flawlessly). They were then invited (actually required!) to rip their origami flowers and transform them into new, interesting forms. After this playful exploration of tearing and reshaping, each group collaborated to combine their ripped flowers into a shared “garden” that tells a story about confronting perfectionism and embracing self-compassion.