Artists Shaping Artists: The Impact of Endowed Professorships at UNCSA

In the days after Hurricane Helene tore through Western North Carolina, a group of filmmaking students loaded equipment into vans and drove toward the devastation. They went not as first responders, but as storytellers, tasked with documenting what remained, what was breaking, and what was being rebuilt.

School of Filmmaking faculty member Lauren Vilchik describes how quickly the work had to come together; travel arranged, gear secured, students organized and alumni collaborators brought into the field. These efforts were made possible through Vilchik’s endowed professorship: the Dale Pollock Professorship in Filmmaking.

What Vilchik and her students found in Western North Carolina became “The Cost of Recovery: Insuring the Future in a Changing Climate,” a documentary about both physical destruction and systemic fragility, but also about human resilience. One student later reflected that the experience “introduced me to filmmakers who have since helped me navigate the industry and opened doors early in my career… it was one of the first times I felt the full weight and responsibility of storytelling.”

Experiences like this are immediate, unrepeatable, and deeply human. They are the quiet architecture of creative excellence and they are made possible by endowed professorships.

The work behind the work

There are sixteen active endowed professorships at UNCSA, with recipients doing important work in all five art schools and the Division of Liberal Arts.

Across disciplines, endowed professorships function not only as recognition for their recipients, but as crucial funds that support the educational infrastructure of the university. They make possible the travel, guest artists, instruments, research, recruitment, student stipends, and creative experiments that would otherwise remain out of reach.

Their deeper impact is harder to quantify. Endowed support allows faculty to build artistic lives that, in turn, expand what students believe is possible for their own. As one professor put it simply, the support “has been transformative in ways that extend beyond the classroom experience.” Another described it as a form of trust; not only in individuals, but in the long arc of artistic education itself.

How endowed professorships change lives

Across campus, endowed professorships are at work in countless ways.

In Music, endowed support helps opera and voice faculty recruit emerging talent, take students to festivals and summer programs, and create transformative performance opportunities on national and international stages. In the piano studios, professorships power scholarships, assistantships, and a thriving performance series that exposes students to guest artists and frequent recitals.

In Dance, endowed funding sustains an ecosystem of live music, guest artists, costume creation, and technical support that brings choreographic visions to life. In Filmmaking, it sends students into the field to confront real-world stories — from climate disasters to community resilience — with cameras and compassion.

In Design & Production, endowed support fuels performance innovation and animatronics, invests in industrial equipment and graduate stipends, and helps students connect directly with professionals in themed entertainment industries. In Drama, professorships support intensive audition review, rigorous training, and the development of artistic self-trust, while honoring legacies that have shaped generations of performers.

In the Division of Liberal Arts, endowed professorships expand pathways into German Studies, international experiences, Fulbright awards, literature, and humanities. They sustain teaching that continues far beyond the classroom calendar, through conversations, memory, and students’ creative lives.

A shared principle across disciplines

Across all of these voices, a shared idea emerges: endowed professorships do not simply support individual careers. They shape environments.

Professorships allow faculty to bring the world into the classroom, take students into the world, and build artistic communities that extend beyond the boundaries of the UNCSA campus. They fund both the extraordinary and the essential: guest artists and sewing machines, international travel and studio assistants, documentary equipment and piano tunings.

In doing so, they create continuity between past, present, and future artistic lives. They honor the faculty and donors whose names they bear, while investing in the students whose lives they will change in ways that cannot yet be measured.

What endowed support ultimately makes possible

Artistic education is often described in terms of talent, discipline, and training. Beneath those visible elements is something less often named: sustained care for the work and the students, and trust in the process of becoming an artist.

In rehearsal rooms, studios, theaters, classrooms, and locations far beyond campus, the effects of endowed professorships accumulate quietly and steadily. None of it happens in isolation. It is all connected — by teachers, by students, and by the supporters who are willing to invest in helping artists shape artists.

For donors, an endowed professorship is more than a title. It is a living commitment to the future of artistic education.