Hidden Strawberries by Ali Namayandeh, discusses environmental and immigrant justice through the story of Valentina, played by Luna Lau. (Image credit: Frank Chen)
Arts and Sustainability
Jump to: Funding Visiting Artists Courses Opportunities
A multitude of tools and perspectives are needed to understand sustainability issues and imagine creative, diverse, and impactful solutions that can not only help the natural world, but also inspire cultural and social change. The arts – music, exhibitions, theater, film, storytelling, and more – provide a powerful lens through which to bear witness to our changing world and motivate transformative change. See below for ways to join our vibrant and growing program.
Upcoming Arts and Sustainability Events
Doerr Arts & Sustainability Fund
The Doerr Arts & Sustainability Fund has just announced its first award recipients. The fund offers support to interdisciplinary projects led by academic staff or faculty that test new directions and possibilities in sustainability and the arts at Stanford.
Jane Willenbring and Paul DeMarinis
Jane Willenbring and Paul DeMarinis will be developing an interdisciplinary sound art installation using acoustic sensors to let visitors hear live soil soundscapes across campus.
Nilam Ram and Chris Chafe
Nilam Ram and Chris Chafe will be building an interactive sound installation merging climate data with thousands of individuals’ sonic interpretations of the data.
E'jaaz Mason
E'jaaz will be hosting an interactive film festival and community event series with filmmakers and the Stanford community exploring climate change sustainability and environmental equity.
Dena Montague
Dena will be developing a storytelling multimedia exhibition co-created with community partners in East Palo Alto and staged at the d.school called “Climates of Inequality.”
Funded in part by the Center for Just Environmental Futures.
Current Doerr Visiting Artist
2026–27 Doerr Visiting Artist: Saif Azzuz
Upcoming Exhibition California Current: Art and Histories from the Bay Area, with Saif Azzuz and many others
June 5, 2026 Past Workshop with artist Saif Azzuz and cultural fire practitioner Elizabeth Azzuz.
Past Doerr Visiting Artists
Gastronomy with Ramón Perisé and Vayu Hill-Maini
Chef Ramón Perisé of Mugaritz—the world-renowned, two-Michelin-star Basque restaurant celebrated for its experimental approach to gastronomy—joined Stanford bioengineer Vayu Hill-Maini to explore how experimental cuisine, fermentation, and microbial science converge through Stanford Doerr's Artist in Residence Program. As a Doerr Visiting Artist, Ramón worked with Vayu’s lab to study Neurospora, a bright orange fungus with surprising culinary, nutritional, and biological potential—opening the door to what they call “genetic gastronomy.”
Ocean science meets art in new visiting artist program
In 2024, the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and Stanford’s Office of the Vice President for the Arts invited the first visiting artist for sustainability at Stanford to create new artwork commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Woods Institute for the Environment. Bay Area sculptor and installation artist Mark Baugh-Sasaki, a Stanford alum, was selected to collaborate with scientists funded by the Woods Institute to explore how ocean sediment cores can inform ocean restoration.
Featured Arts and Sustainability Projects
Art & Plankton
Jiabao Li & Manu Prakash collaborated to create The Long Fall: A descent into the Ocean's Living Memory.
The immersive artistic journey places the audience within the vertical ocean column, embodying the perspective of plankton drifting endlessly downward. This new frame of reference underscores the overlooked significance of these microscopic organisms, which quietly regulate half of Earth's carbon cycle. Ignoring them in climate models results in an 80-gigaton discrepancy—nearly 10% of the global carbon budget.
Art & Trees with Char McCurdy & Aaron Straight
In this episode of Art &, we catch up with designer Char McCurdy and biochemist Aaron Straight about The Giving Tree, an upcoming Stanford IntroSem being taught this fall that will start with a single tree from campus and asks students to explore what can be made from as much of it as possible.
Featured Courses
Sustainable Narratives: A Workshop
Black Ecologies
Archaeology and Environmental Aesthetics
Multimedia Environmental Communication
The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating: Technology, History, and Justice
Reimagining Sustainability: Beyond Growth, Progress, and Technosolutionism
Opportunities for the Stanford Community to engage with arts and sustainability!
2024 EJ Film Festival
More news
Join an event on April 6 to hear how artists and scientists are reimagining sustainable food systems.
A new play combines science and art to raise awareness about overlooked climate impacts and spark conversations to identify solutions.
A new anthology of environmental justice storytelling from the Environmental Justice Working Group at Stanford addresses topics including childhood lead poisoning, extreme weather events, and connection to nature.
Leadership Team
- Program Manager, Stanford Arts, Office of the Vice President for the Arts
- Terry Huffington Professor, Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and Professor of Photon Science
- Operations Manager, Research Initiatives
- Director of Interdisciplinary Arts Programs
- Director of Writing and Arts for Doerr School of Sustainability, Advanced Lecturer, Program in Writing and Rhetoric
- Managing Director, Sustainable Societies Initiative and Assistant Dean for Research Initiatives
Community section coming soon, stay tuned. Please contact Emily Polk for more information.