Creative Entrepreneurship

Explore how artistic practice can serve as a foundation for entrepreneurial thinking, leadership, and creative project building. If you’ve produced a play, organized a concert, mounted an exhibition, led a student group, or developed an interdisciplinary project, you have already practiced many of the core skills required to launch and sustain creative ventures: collaboration, budgeting, project management, storytelling, iteration, and leadership.

Partnering with the Lemann Program on Creativity and Entrepreneurship, the OFA supports an entrepreneurial mindset as a creative tool for shaping ideas, developing projects, and navigating careers in the arts and creative industries. Students with ideas for creative or artistic ventures can take creative entrepreneurship classes and join cohorts of students working on special projects that tackle global challenges—like public health, climate change, and social inequality. Students go to workshops, studio labs, receive mentorship, and are guided through the process of building early-stage social-impact ventures.

Students will have opportunities to:

• Connect with makers across disciplines
• Learn from entrepreneurs and leaders working in creative fields
• Develop ideas into clear, actionable next steps
• Explore funding opportunities, partnerships, and campus resources
• Practice communicating ideas through storytelling, pitches, and early prototypes

For more information on creative entrepreneurship and opportunities for individual or group ventures, please contact Sam Magee, Director on Creativity and Entrepreneurship. In addition, check out the OFA funding page for project funds that can help support new ventures.

The OFA also hosts a Student Arts Leadership Forum each year that brings student arts leaders into conversation with OFA leadership to discuss challenges and opportunities in the cocurricular arts ecosystem and to connect student arts and cultural organizations to each other.