Where Art Meets Academia: SBU Faculty Share a Year of Creative Work

The Hilton Garden Inn ballroom filled with the low hum of conversation as faculty, staff and guests drifted between tables stacked with books, glowing screens, and vivid canvases - a rare space where marine scientists stood beside poets, and dentists beside filmmakers.

The annual Artists, Authors and Editors Showcase, hosted on November 21 by Stony Brook University's College of Arts and Sciences, is a celebration of creative and scholarly work produced across the entire university in the past year.

This year's showcase brought together worksfrom faculty representing 20 departments across six schools and colleges. Unlike a competition, the event is open to any university faculty member who have produced or published books, journals, performances, exhibits, art, recordings or videos in the previous year, a feature that organizers say is essential to its mission.

While the event is hosted by the College of Arts and Sciences, its reach is intentionally university-wide. "It's to celebrate the creativity and scholarly works of all of our university faculty," said Rachel Rodriguez, director of communications for the College of Arts and Sciences, who has helped run the showcase since 2017. "While traditionally, most of the artists, authors and editors who submit their works are representative of CAS, we encourage contributionsfrom all of our faculty- journalism, engineering and health professions, for example."

Rodriguez said the event has grown substantially since she joined the university in 2016, evolving from a smaller gathering with a modest number of mostly print works to a large, curated display, now incorporating numerous digital worksincluding multimedia projects and AI-related installations. She added thatthe showcase presents an opportunity for colleagues to learn what others are doing.

The showcase gives people a chance to gather, mingle and appreciate that work.

For some attendees, the event was a way into the Stony Brook community. Ruth Bhatti, who joined Stony Brook Southampton Hospital as a human resources project manager three months ago, said she attended partly to meet people and partly because she loves art.

"As soon as I joined Stony Brook, I was trying to get to know people," Bhatti said. "This is going to be my community for at least 30 more years, so why not get to know everyone?"

One piece that caught the eye of Bhatti was a painting displayed near the front of the room. The piece she admired was by Han Qin, interdisciplinary artist and adjunct professor in the Department of Art, that was part of Qin's recent solo exhibition, "Han Qin: Little Images" inspired by the early works of Lee Krasner.

Qin said her series is part of a larger body of work exploring human movement and migration, blending photography, hand-cut paper and silk sourced from her hometown. "It's related to one of my favorite poets, Li Bai," she said. "My work connects with those ideas: how people move, how they're shaped by place."

This year's display was not her first. Qin has contributed video collaborations, curation work, and other visual projects in previous years. But she said she values the event for its atmosphere of curiosity.

College of Arts and Sciences Dean David Wrobel emphasized that point. "By being here, you're building a community of appreciation for each other that means the world to us," he said.

He highlighted the breadth of this year's showcase, with work from arts and humanities, social sciences, medical fields and STEM disciplines, and encouraged attendees to engage with pieces created by someone they had not met before. "That's how connections build," Wrobel said.

For organizers, the showcase serves both a practical and symbolic purpose. Making the works visible and celebrating the labor behind them strengthens the university's creative culture.

As Rodriguez put it, "Think about how much hard work goes into each of these works. This is a great opportunity to recognize the creativity and scholarly work of our faculty, where our entire community can appreciate it."

For attendees like Bhatti, the answer was simple. "I love art in any form," she said. "And now I know this is a place where people actually make it."

- Lily Miller