To brighten Winter Quarter, try new student programming at UChicago

Opportunities for creativity and connection abound this quarter through Winterfest, a new series of programming from the College. From an outdoor light festival to a collective writing project inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio’s plague-era Decameron, these arts-focused activities build upon the University of Chicago’s most creative campus traditions to foster connection and excitement in the new year.

Winterfest aims to help undergraduate students attend to their personal well-being through programming that spans a variety of areas, including the arts and humanities, campus recreation, social activities, personal wellness, professional and academic development and engaging with the city of Chicago. Many of the signature events during College Winterfest invite collaboration through creative teams. Creative teams are groups of three to five students who collaborate on the design and construction of projects, both in virtual and physical space, over the course of Winter Quarter.

Learn more and register a team here.

Event highlights include:

• Light Fantastic & Sound Fantastic: Two public art projects will bring light into the darkness and sound into the silence of the winter months, by engaging students in the design and construction of light and sound installations which will be displayed in prominent locations across campus.
• Decameron Redux: An online writing game that features weekly prompts inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron. 
• The Chicago Futures Project: A series of lectures and panel discussions on the future of urban spaces and communities (post-COVID-19 and otherwise) leading to an event in which creative teams of students present proposals for addressing challenges facing cities today.
• Media Art & Design BrowserFest: Borrowing from the format of the demoparty, BrowserFest invites the tinkerers, hackers, poets, musicians, and artists among our students to build their own designs in and of the internet browser. Novices of browser art will have the opportunity to acquire the necessary skills in a series of asynchronous, interactive, and hyper-media workshops.

To stay up to date on all of these events and activities now and throughout the quarter, visit the College Winterfest website at winterfest.uchicago.edu.