An Intergenerational Center for Arts and Wellness collaboration with Wake Forest won a statewide Community Partner of the Year award.
The Creative Care class teaches students how to be empathetic, effective volunteers.
Students partner with adults living with memory loss or frailty to create poems for an “arts as medicine” project.
In early March 2026, 12 students packed their portfolios, sharpened their pitches, and traveled to Tennessee to attend the Southeast Theatre Conference (SETC), one of the largest networks of theatre practitioners in the country. Made possible by the Campo Fund for Experiential Learning, the trip gave students four days to participate in design competitions and acting workshops, audition for competitive roles, and network with professionals in the field. Students seized every opportunity to showcase their work to an audience of industry experts and gained invaluable skills that will stay with them long after graduation.
For months, students in Wake Forest’s Theatre Department have been reflecting on memories: what they are, how they show up in daily life, and what it means for one’s memory to be distorted by the present.
In Harold Pinter’s Old Times, directed by Dr. Cindy Gendrich, Professor of Theatre, students engage with these themes in a way that extends far beyond memorizing lines and rehearsing choreography. As a psychology major with minors in neuroscience and theatre, Assistant Director Nancy Huang (’27) invites the whole team — from the cast members to the stage crew — to explore the play from an interdisciplinary approach, bridging research with the embodied experience of bringing a character to life on stage. The result is a powerful production that connects classroom learning with real, lived experience.
Eli Leadham has been named a Schwarzman Scholar, one of just 150 students worldwide to pursue a fully-funded master’s program in global affairs at Tsinghua University. A sociology major from Portland, Oregon, Leadham plans to spend the year abroad advocating for transitional justice and human rights on a global scale.
Brave Spaces, Entrepreneurship, and Food. These are the words at the heart of Dr. Ariel D. Smith’s course, “Black Entrepreneurship in America” (ENT 304C).
An elective in the Center for Entrepreneurship, the class tells United States history through the lens of Black entrepreneurs, whose contributions and experiences helped lay the foundation of entrepreneurship in America today.
On the surface, the posters lining the walls of Benson 410 at Wake Forest’s third annual Center for Functional Materials (CFM) Research Day looked like the typical trappings of an academic showcase: charts, microscopy images, material diagrams, lines of data. But a closer look revealed something deeper. These projects—ranging from nanomaterials for cancer detection to thin-film technologies for improved solar cells—represent the quiet engines of innovation that shape how we communicate, generate energy, heal, and live.
For nearly four years, Megan Bennett has served as an assistant professor in Health and Exercise Science at Wake Forest. Yet her commitment to public health—and her two decades of research on chronic disease interventions—extends far beyond the classroom. This month, she’s launching her most ambitious project yet: Supporting People through Inclusive Cultural Eating for Diabetes, or SPICE-D. Bennett recently received an Academic Community Engagement (ACE) Fellowship(opens in a new tab), which will provide targeted support for the SPICE-D project.
Wake Forest University is proud to announce a new academic initiative that brings together experiential learning, interdisciplinary scholarship, and community partnership: the four-week nationally recognized Summer Institute at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA) at Old Salem Museums and Gardens. The Summer Institute, now in its forty-ninth year, is a rigorous program that has helped shape the study of Southern material culture. Through this new partnership, Wake Forest and MESDA will immerse students in the rich history and culture of Southern decorative arts through hands-on learning, field research, and individualized mentorship.
This summer, the Wake Forest University School of Business welcomed faculty and administrators from nearly every top-30 U.S. business school for the 2025 Leaders of Experiential Project-Based Education (LEPE) conference. Now in its 19th year, the annual gathering convenes higher education professionals committed to advancing experiential learning in business education.
Monique O’Connell is a historian, not an engineer. As Professor and Chair of Wake Forest University’s Department of History, she is more familiar with Renaissance politics than the tensile strength of stone.
However, standing in a fourth-floor classroom at Wake Downtown, O’Connell talked to a dozen students enrolled in EGR 111: Introduction to Engineering Thinking and Practice about the connections between da Vinci and modern engineering methods.