ATLANTA — Georgia Tech Arts has announced the recipients of its 2025–26 Catalyst Grants and Einstein Grants, an initiative led by Avital Shira, director of arts integration and innovation, that supports interdisciplinary projects connecting artistic practice with research, education, well-being, and public engagement across campus and the broader community.

The annual grants advance Georgia Tech’s commitment to creativity as a driver of innovation, bringing together faculty, staff, students, and community partners from across disciplines.

Catalyst Grant Awardees

The 2025–26 Catalyst Grant recipients represent a wide range of academic units and professional areas, reflecting the many ways the arts intersect with teaching, research, and everyday campus life.

Victoria Chang (Poetry@Tech) received funding for Poetry Everywhere, an initiative expanding access to poetry through translation-focused programming and public engagement. Building on collaborations with Modern Languages and Atlanta Global Studies, the project will bring poets and translators to campus and explore placing poetry in public spaces, inviting moments of reflection amid daily routines.

At the Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking, Anna Doll will lead Paper and Nature Dye Exhibition, establishing a dedicated garden space that allows students and faculty to engage directly with the raw materials used in papermaking and natural dyes. The project integrates plant cultivation with artistic practice, bridging scientific inquiry and creative exploration.

Jennifer Lux (Scheller College of Business) and Danielle Willkens (School of Architecture) received support for Penn Center Alternative Spring Break, a multidisciplinary arts initiative rooted in community engagement. In partnership with the Gullah/Geechee Nation, participants will travel to the Penn Center National Historic Landmark District in South Carolina, creating artistic responses while learning from a site central to African American history.

Biophilia, led by Belinda Person (Administrative Services Center) in collaboration with Krystian Ramlogan, is an immersive installation exploring human relationships with the natural world through painting, sound, and spatial design. Inspired by Indigenous ecological knowledge, the project emphasizes reflection, sensory experience, and reconnection with place.

Ramlogan, a faculty member in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, also leads Spaces: A Pilot Sensory Arts Installation in collaboration with Jillann Hertel. The project explores how light, sound, and media can function as forms of care, offering moments of presence and regulation within the intensity of campus life.

Stephanie Selvick (Belonging and Student Support), in collaboration with Alexandra Teixeira Riggs, received funding for Photovoice for Graduate Student Belonging. The arts-based research project engages graduate students as co-researchers, using photography and storytelling to examine experiences of belonging and to inform future student support initiatives through public exhibition and dialogue.

In the School of Music, Alexandria Smith, in collaboration with Full Radius Dance, Douglas Scott, and Noah Posner will lead Resonant Bodies, a community-based learning project connecting music technology and industrial design students with the Atlanta-based Full Radius Dance. Through collaborative design and experimentation, students will create compositions and wearable technologies while engaging with accessibility, disability, and performance.

Alexander Vlahos (Department of Biomedical Engineering), in collaboration with Mark Wentzel, received funding for Bridging Art and Engineering: An Artist-Led Creativity Intervention for Biomedical Engineering Education. The project integrates drawing and sculptural practices into engineering coursework to strengthen spatial reasoning, creativity, and conceptual understanding.

Einstein Grant Awardees

Georgia Tech Arts also announced the recipients of its 2025–26 Einstein Grants, which support experimental projects connecting artistic inquiry with research, technology, and public imagination.

Hyojin Kwon, assistant professor in the School of Architecture, received funding for From Campus Waste to Civic Architecture. The project builds on Kwon’s research into computational media, advanced fabrication, and material reuse, transforming campus waste into architectural prototypes and civic-scale installations. Through cross-campus collaboration, the work examines sustainability, sensory perception, and material agency while reimagining discarded materials as public-facing design artifacts.

A second Einstein Grant was awarded to Joel Silverman, an Atlanta-based community artist, for Albert Einstein Ghostphone. The interactive sound installation imagines a conversation between present-day Georgia Tech scholars and the voice of Albert Einstein as he might have sounded in 1955. The work will invite participants to reflect on scientific discovery, ethics, and the evolving relationship between human knowledge and artificial intelligence.

Using an AI-driven speech model trained within the limits of Einstein’s lifetime knowledge, the project blends history, technology, and performance to provoke curiosity about physics, democracy, and the responsibilities that accompany innovation.

Together, the 2025–26 Catalyst and Einstein Grant projects advance Georgia Tech’s Transforming Tomorrow vision by leveraging creativity as a catalyst for innovation, connection, and public impact. Through interdisciplinary collaboration and community-engaged work, these projects demonstrate how the arts help solve complex challenges, enrich campus life, and shape a more inclusive and imaginative future.

For more information about these programs, contact Director of Arts Integration and Innovation Avital Shira for Georgia Tech Arts.