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Our Mission

Nature, Environment, Science & Technology (NEST) Studio for the Arts 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.

Window of an art gallery with a fox and turtle decal on it

ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ18 Us

Since its inception at CU Boulder 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 Boulder, Denver, Longmont, Broomfield, Arvada, Carbondale, Steamboat, and beyond, have garnered media attention in the,,,,, and more. Pre-COVID, NEST’s 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’s outward-facing mission.

NEST has supported more than 80 graduate students’ 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’d like to stay in touch and know more about NEST’s events and news, please look for updates here and follow us on and.

Recent Events

REFRESH at DMNS

This art-science collaboration—between a biochemist and filmmaker—looks 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. 

Sound Planetarium at the American Astronomy Society

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  are rendered in sound and light, all controlled by the user via gaze-activation and include viewing the sky at wavelengths beyond human vision.

Art & Science at Arvada Arts Center

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.

geometric frustrations

Exhibited in east window SOUTH, a solo exhibition by Boulder- 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’s crust die to compression. It reflects upon how we attempt to organize, represent, and often discard space and place. 

Sensing Ice

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 ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ18.