Tina M. Campt succeeds Paul Muldoon as new director of Princeton Atelier

Tina Campt has worn many hats throughout her career as a scholar of history and photography, a cultural theorist, and Princeton’s Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor in the Humanities, teaching in the Department of Art and Archaeology. Beginning July 1, she added another item to her resume: director of the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Atelier program, a group of immersive courses in which visiting artists leading their fields collaborate with Princeton students to create new works.

Campt replaces Paul Muldoon, who retired after the 24–25 academic year after leading the Atelier for over twenty years. Muldoon was only the program’s second director after its founder, Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison. Muldoon and Morrison both shaped the Atelier into the staple of the Lewis Center it is today, and Campt now takes up the mantle to steer the program into a new era.

“It was kind of a dream job for me,” Campt said in an interview with The Daily Princetonian.

The Atelier is known for bringing award-winning artists from different disciplines and backgrounds into Princeton classrooms to create ambitious new works of art over a 12-week semester. Past Atelier classes have included “Athens, Georgia,” in which students created a rock musical based on “The Frogs” by Aristophanes; a class fusing dance, theater, and poetry to speak to the topic “How To Find a Missing Black Woman;” and “Baby Wants Candy: Creating Comedy for Television,” whose students learn from professors and guest speakers well-versed in the television industry.

Campt will bring something new to the program by highlighting the faculty already on Princeton’s campus, a change from the usual focus on outside artists. “I want to recenter the faculty in the arts here at Princeton within [the Atelier],” she told the ‘Prince.’

Campt also said she aimed to expand the Atelier to provide more students with access to its resources. “It’s always been a … very boutique kind of operation,” she said. “Its gift is to be able to expose students to thinking from within practicing artists’ minds … I just think that more students should have access to that.”

The program’s offerings have slimmed down this semester due to the leadership transition. As opposed to usual semesters, in which four to five Atelier courses are offered, only the returning “Baby Wants Candy” course is available this semester.

Campt also noted that Atelier, which was endowed in 2009 with a “generous” gift from an anonymous donor, was more insulated than other programs from federal cuts to funding sources like National Endowment for the Arts. However, she lamented the loss of artistic freedom she feels that the current political climate has created.

“Artists are not necessarily being encouraged to be as radically creative or experimental as they would under different circumstances,” she said. Campt sees the Atelier and its focus on collaboration as a way to remedy this.

“If we can continue to make a space where artists feel like they can think and imagine boldly, and radically, and without boundaries, then I think that we have a big contribution to make, in particularly this moment in time,” she said.

Lily Hutcheson is a member of the Class of 2028 and an assistant editor for The Prospect and a contributing constructor for the Puzzles Section.

Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.