MMC’s Arts in Action Showcase Connects Students Through Creative Practice

The event, held on April 29, fills the College’s Judith Mara Carson Center for Visual Arts—also known as The Judy—with student projects in visual art, dance, theatre, music, creative writing, film and digital media, costume and set design, animation, and more. Launched in 2023, it was conceived by faculty members to give students an opportunity to engage with work beyond their disciplines and experience their peers’ creations in a shared space.

This year’s incarnation, titled Arts in Action, was organized by Dina Weiss, The Judy’s new director and chair of art and art history; The Judy’s Director of Operations, Xander Peterson; and colleagues across the faculty. It featured returning elements, such as the Elevator Plays, in which Carson Hall elevators serve as the backdrop for plays written, directed, and performed by students. There were also printmaking and theatrical makeup demonstrations; theatrical improv performed throughout the night by Professor Ellen Orenstein’s Viewpoints class; and rows of exhibitions.

In addition, Weiss expanded the event’s workshop offerings to include interactive sessions in ceramics, animation, costume design, printmaking, and photography. “I wanted to center and demystify the idea of ‘process,’ so that attendees wouldn’t just encounter the exhibitions and all the work that students had done but could also get a sense of how those projects were created by participating in a workshop,” she said.

She also incorporated students from Northeastern’s New York City Scholars program, inviting an engineering class that had been working out of The Judy all semester to demonstrate what they had been learning about 3D printing. Their projects were on display, alongside sculptures art students had created in the same space, underscoring the connections between artistic and technical practice.

As students buzzed around The Judy, discovering something new in every corner, student presenter Caitlin Bell ’26 was excited to share her experimental art project, Is This What I’m Made Of?, a fabric installation that incorporates notes and assignments from her MMC classes. A BA Theatre Arts major with a concentration in Directing, Bell created the piece while taking her first Art elective this academic year. “I wanted to create something that represented MMC and my time here,” she said, noting that the piece took approximately 60 hours to create. “It was so much fun—I learned a lot about multidisciplinary art, and I feel like it also helped me in my work as a director.”

Elsewhere on the floor, Dance major Isabel Torok ’26 invited audience members to interact with a collaborative mosaic-tile display created by her Mixed-Media class. “Anyone can come and add their own piece,” she explained. The class was a first for Torok, who enrolled wanting to make full use of MMC’s arts curriculum after being inspired by several Dance professors who are interdisciplinary artists.

Attending the arts showcase was also another first, and she was eager to see other projects filling the floor. “There’s a little bit of everything here, and something for everyone,” she said. “It speaks to the collaborative community at Marymount.”

Weiss hopes to harness students’ energy and enthusiasm and has been matching it with her own. Arts in Action was one of several events at The Judy that she worked on this semester, her first at the College. On Earth Day, the center held sustainability workshops and a talk with environmental justice artist Mary Mattingly, founder of Swale, a floating edible green space built on a reclaimed barge in New York City. It closed during the pandemic, but Mattingly’s latest project, Floating Garden, opens this month on the Erie Canal.

The Judy also hosted Prison Education Awareness Week, May 4–15, in partnership with the College’s Social Justice Academy and prison education programs at the Bedford Hills and Taconic correctional facilities. The series highlighted the value of higher education in prison with an exhibition of artwork created by Taconic students; screenings of collaborative animation projects by Bedford Hills and 71st Street students; panel discussions on incarceration, education, justice, and community; and a toiletry drive supporting women at Bedford Hills, Taconic, and the nonprofit Hour Children.

“In this first semester that I’ve been here, I was excited to activate The Judy and get to know people and collaborate, but I see this as just a starting point,” Weiss said. “I’m looking forward to continuing to build on this experience to find more ways to bring together disciplines and present more interdisciplinary creative practices and opportunities.”

View photos from Arts in Action below. 

Published: June 05, 2026