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Our Mission

Nature, Environment, Science & Technology (NEST) Studio for the Arts聽is a network of faculty, students, centers and campus units that combine artistic practice and scientific research to explore our common and disparate ways of observing, recording, experimenting and knowing. A series of cross-campus initiatives allow students to directly engage with faculty mentors and inspire alternate modes of communicating with the public.

NEST mural at CASE Building

About Us

Since its inception at CU 抖阴传媒在线 in 2017, NEST (Nature, Environment, Science & Technology) Studio for the Arts has facilitated art-science exhibitions across the state, featuring new research that has manifested in film, sculpture, music, painting, video, virtual reality, and all manner of live performance, including poetry, theater, and dance. Work resulting from NEST support has been presented at scientific conferences, in science journals, and yielded quantitative data in multiple dissertations.

Partnerships with several dozen intuitions, ranging from galleries to public libraries to museums, in 抖阴传媒在线, Denver, Longmont, Broomfield, Arvada, Carbondale, Steamboat, and beyond, have garnered media attention in the,,,,, and more. Pre-COVID, NEST鈥檚 work compromised more than half of the public-facing press about the arts on campus, more than any art-related department and the School of Music combined and stands as a clear metric of the campus鈥檚 outward-facing mission.

NEST has supported more than 80 graduate students鈥 original research projects with students in: Aerospace Engineering, Art & Art History, Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts, Critical Media Practices, English, Evolutionary Biology, Geological Sciences, History, Mathematics, Mechanical Engineering, Music, Philosophy, Psychology and Neuroscience, Theatre and Dance, and beyond.

If you鈥檇 like to stay in touch and know more about NEST鈥檚 events and news, please look for updates here and follow us on and.

Recent Events

Prometheus Fire is currently open to the public at JSCBB NW Staiwell and lounge. The exhibition brings together works of art and science that highlight the sensory experience of living in the climate crisis. Through movement, touch, material, and sound, the artists invite viewers into a dialogue with landscapes under transformation. The title references Prometheus, the mythic figure who gave fire to humanity, and the Great Basin bristlecone pine 鈥淧rometheus,鈥 cut down in 1964 for climate research. Both stories remind us of fire鈥檚 dual role: as a source of survival and innovation, but also as a destructive force now fueling global warming and wildfires.

The exhibition, called聽Desire Lines: Charting Firefly Love and Light @ Benson Earth Sciences & Map Library blends art, science and geography to deepen viewers' understanding of fireflies鈥 nocturnal ecosystems and the connection between living light, creativity and nature. The exhibition brings together Dr. Orit Peleg and student Nolan Bonnie, Naomi Heiser and philosopher Jonathon Keats.

This art-science collaboration鈥攂etween a biochemist and filmmaker鈥攍ooks at the microscopic ways cyanobacteria move, on an individual level and in colonies. If we study these organisms and their varied forms, we might discover ways to improve our future.聽

Created by a team of VR artists, astronomers, and teachers, the Sound Planetarium allows for an immersive experience of stars and stellar constellations rendered and interacted with through visual and sonic abstraction. The stellar properties聽 are rendered in sound and light, all controlled by the user via gaze-activation and include viewing the sky at wavelengths beyond human vision.

NEST co-sponsored this regional exhibition, which explores the ways that fourteen contemporary artists use scientific concepts, datasets, research, and developments to inform their creative work. It highlights the work of NEST graduate fellows Joelle Cicak, Camila Friedman-Gerlicz, Netta Ofer, Eileen Roscina, and Justin Trupiano.

Exhibited in聽east window SOUTH, a solo exhibition by 抖阴传媒在线- and Limassol-based artist Marina Kassianidou revolves around a series of drawings on sheets of log-log graph paper printed by the U.S. Department of the Interior Geological Survey Water Resources Division. Rescuing the graph paper from the trash, Kassianidou crumpled individual sheets, partially unfolded them, and then meticulously drew over every resulting mark, paralleling the folding of Earth鈥檚 crust die to compression. It reflects upon how we attempt to organize, represent, and often discard space and place.聽

NEST graduate fellow, Chris Dunn, visited Greenland to study shifting glaciers and showcased his photographs at the Jerry Crail Johnson Earth Sciences and Map Library at the 抖阴传媒在线.