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.

Explore these stories of artistic discovery and philanthropic support by school below.