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Office of the Provost and Academic Affairs

Grants

The Sherman Fairchild Foundation has awarded $500,000.00 to Purchase College to fund The TAPROOT Project through academic year 2028.

Technology in the Arts Project: Reinvent, Originate, Open, Transform (the “TAPROOT Project”), the goal is to foster an expansive creative culture on campus in which emerging technologies are strategically and intentionally integrated across the arts. Just as a taproot is a deeply embedded source of energy for a plant, infusing technology will add new and sustaining energy to the arts.

This grant offers a remarkable opportunity to build bridges between and among the arts and technology, broaden and deepen our capacity for teaching and learning about art, and explore previously unimagined avenues for making art. This is the first of many steps to create cross-disciplinary degree options that will inspire students to extend their personal artistic practice via immersive performance, artificial intelligence (AI), coding, application programming interfaces, geospatial information systems (GIS), machine learning, transmedia practice, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed realities.

Mission

The TAPROOT Project will foster an expansive creative culture on campus in which emerging technologies are strategically and intentionally integrated across the arts.

Vision

The Project is committed to innovation and collaboration, bridging art and technology to foster new forms of learning, creativity, and community impact. The TAPROOT Project aims to transform Purchase College by establishing a dynamic center for interdisciplinary exploration, giving it a new identity at the intersection of art, technology, and diverse fields. By supporting fellows who challenge traditional boundaries, the Project aspires to enrich the curriculum and campus culture with bold, hands-on approaches that broaden research, teaching, and collaborative potential.

Project Goals

  1. Help arts faculty learn more about emerging technologies as tools for course development and teaching.
  1. Create new academic opportunities that will prepare students to join the workforce in the growing field of tech-infused creative expression and, in so doing, decrease the digital divide between students with access to technology and those without.
  1. Establish a framework for integrating technology and art with the Purchase College curriculum.

TAPROOT Committee

The TAPROOT Committee, composed of faculty and staff representing arts and technology disciplines across the institution, will foster campus investment in the project and encourage cross-disciplinary collaboration. The committee will provide advice on maximizing access to training and resources, appointing TAPROOT Fellows, creating the media lab, and facilitating . The Committee’s longer-term planning will focus on considerations such as scalability and whether innovations arising out of TAPROOT Project could potentially become the basis for new micro-credential, minor, or degree programs.

TAPROOT Fellows

TAPROOT Fellows will be faculty from across the arts who are interested in collaborating, building emerging technologies into their courses, and teaching students how to use those technologies as tools in the creative process. Twelve TAPROOT Fellows will be appointed over the course of the project: three cohorts of four faculty members each. The term will be one academic year. The chosen fellow will receive $5000 payable in two parts, half at the start and the remaining balance at the completion of the project.

There will be two types of Taproot Fellows – individual and collaborative:

Project Activities