Duke Arts Creative Climate Internship

Timeline

2025

This internship ran from August 2025 to May 2026.

Description

Affiliated programs: Green Devils Intern Program, Duke Arts Create

Summary

The Duke Arts Creative Climate Internship offered students the freedom to explore the intersection between art and the environment. Through close collaboration with Duke Arts, the Creative Climate Intern connected both Durham community artists as well as Duke Arts Create instructors through multimodal projects - primarily videos and written articles - that
told a story about the role art plays in sustainability and climate justice. Through the project, the intern produced a Duke Arts series titled, “The Art of Renewal,” featuring a variety of Duke Arts Create instructors and their sustainable art practices. By creating engaging and accessible content, the project targeted a variety of audiences to bring awareness to an increasingly important topic in the modern world.

Goals

1) Bridge the gap between the Durham art community and DukeArts through climate-based storytelling.
2) Highlight the intersection of art and climate justice.
3) Spotlight different DukeArts Create instructors and their sustainable art practices.

Experience and Learning Outcomes

Through this internship, the student engaged in consistent planning, from brainstorming interview questions, scheduling appropriate times with artists, leading interviews, and crafting the videos and articles that accompanied each interview. Each interview offered the opportunity to addressed a different aspect of sustainability within the art world. For example, the Creative Climate series, the Art of Renewal, covered many different media and types of art. From papermaking, weaving, and upcycling, the series emphasized that sustainability in the artistic world is multifaceted.

Through this project, the intern honed their writing skills, as well as improving their videography and journalism. The
project showcased that sustainability in the artistic world can look like a variety of things, and it is inherently unsustainable to limit a single definition of the concept. The intern reported that they will carry this conceptualization of sustainability into all future endeavors, "now with an understanding of the impact intentionality has on climate efforts".

Recommendations

Building on the success of this year, the intern suggested finalizing a specific series theme at the beginning of the semester in order to give the team ample time to reach out to potential interviewees, so that the team can more easily adapt to unforeseen circumstances. Additionally, the intern also recommended developing a specific publishing schedule to ensure that workload stays consistent throughout the duration of the project.

Student Interns: Jenna Arafeh and Yuchen Chen

Intern Supervisor: Anna Wallace, Student Engagement Manager for Duke Arts