Message from the Chair

Welcome to the Department of Fine and Performing Arts at Loyola University Chicago. Bringing together music, theatre, dance, and the visual arts, our department is built around the belief that artistic practice offers a vital way of understanding ourselves, one another, and the world we share. Across classrooms, studios, rehearsal rooms, galleries, and performance spaces, students develop their craft while learning to listen carefully, think imaginatively, and create in community. Although each discipline has its own language and traditions, all are connected by a shared commitment to curiosity, expression, collaboration, and meaningful human engagement.

These commitments are central to a Jesuit education. Loyola asks students not only to develop their intellectual and artistic abilities, but also to reflect on how those gifts might be used in service of others. The arts bring that charge to life. Through performance, creation, and study, students encounter unfamiliar perspectives, grapple with difficult questions, and search for beauty, meaning, and truth. Such experiences are especially valuable at a moment when artificial intelligence is rapidly changing our lives and social isolation has become increasingly common. Technology may transform the tools we use, but the arts remind us that creativity remains profoundly human, shaped by empathy, vulnerability, presence, and the experience of making something together.

The DFPA is fortunate to be home to an extraordinary faculty of artists, scholars, and teachers whose work enriches both our students and the larger Loyola community. Our department welcomes students at every level of engagement: majors and minors pursuing focused artistic study, as well as students from across the university who sing in an ensemble, perform in a production, take a studio course, attend an exhibition, or discover an unexpected creative interest. Throughout the year, our concerts, plays, dance performances, exhibitions, lectures, and interdisciplinary programs draw people together. These events are more than presentations of finished work. They create opportunities to reflect, to encounter one another, and to experience how art can deepen understanding, foster belonging, and strengthen a community.

We invite everyone, at Loyola and throughout the broader community, to find a place in the DFPA and join us in making, experiencing, and celebrating the arts.

Kirsten Hedegaard, PhD
Professor, Chair
Department of Fine and Performing Arts
Loyola University Chicago