Social Ecology Studio
The Social Ecology Studio is an experimental arts research lab housed within the School of Art, dedicated to advancing sustainability and resilience through the arts. Capitalizing on art’s ability to interest, inform and activate its audience, the studio is piloting methodologies to engage and connect community members and policy makers with issues entrenched in social ecology. Serving as a resource hub for artists, the studio’s mission is to initiate and facilitate collaborative projects with scientific and social researchers across campus. Its aim is to develop and research methods for the arts to impact and enhance the local ecosystem, and to connect with and enrich the community.
Studio Director: Michael Marshall
Opportunities
Composite image of the Chemours Mine in Southeast Georgia. Photographs by Professor Michael Marshall.
Art in the Field
Spend your Spring Break observing and experiencing the intersections of environmental, social, and cultural issues within the lower coastal plains of Georgia.
Working in the field and in the studio, you will produce work addressing those intersections using your chosen media of art.
Experience Georgia’s coast as both your classroom and your studio. This immersive field study explores the intersections of art, ecology, history, and culture through direct engagement with some of the state’s most significant landscapes and communities.
During Spring Break, you’ll travel to sites including Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park, Wormsloe State Historic Site, Savannah, Ossabaw Island, and the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography, learning from artists, scientists, historians, and museum professionals while developing your own site-responsive artwork.
Through field sketching, photography, studio practice, critiques, and discussions, you’ll create a body of work inspired by firsthand experiences with coastal ecosystems, environmental change, cultural heritage, and contemporary issues. The course concludes with a public exhibition of student work.
This program is ideal for students who want to:
- Develop art inspired by real places, communities, and environmental issues
- Learn from artists, scientists, historians, and cultural experts in the field
- Explore Georgia’s coastal landscapes through an interdisciplinary lens
- Be part of a collaborative community of creative and curious peers
Past Studio Research Projects
The North Oconee River Project
Led by Carla Cao, MA candidate in Music, the North Oconee River Project is a collaboration between music, art, law, ecology and the greater Athens community. Its mission is to recognize legal personhood rights of the North Oconee River, establishing the city’s first-ever Rights of Nature laws. Leveraging the methodology of Creative Placemaking the project is piloting a research model that utilizes the arts to not only foster community engagement but also facilitate the development and transformation of environmental policy.
Imagination Squared
Led by Christina Foard, MFA candidate in Studio Art, Imagination Squared utilizes a participatory design model to engage communities in conversations about individual and collective notions of resilience. The project explores art’s capacity to engage and extend a conversation across fields and across spectrums of the community through collective co-authorship of an arts installation.
The Hive
Led by Cristina Echezarreta, MFA candidate in Studio Art, The Hive is a project designed to leverage the power of the arts as a tool to enhance individual and community transformation for offenders housed within the confinements of Georgia’s state prisons. Investigating parallel hierarchies within bee hives and prison systems, the project engages individuals through creative practice, vocational skill building, ecology education, revitalization and empowerment.
Last updated: October 16, 2026