About Us

Our Story

Nature, Environment, Science & Technology (NEST) Studio for the Arts is part of the larger campus-wide Grand Challenge initiative, and is open to all CU Boulder students, faculty, staff, campus units and community members.

CU Boulder is home to some of the top Arts, and Earth and Space science programs in the country. NEST explores the interrelation, generative overlaps and productive differences between these respective arts-based and science-based disciplines.

NEST seeks projects that engage with central questions of how methodologies within the sciences can inform artists and their approach to art making. In turn, what can contemporary art practice reveal about science to scientists? How can we use the practice of art to directly inform the practice of science, and vice versa? What central assumptions in scientific training might be challenged by approaches employed by the arts and humanities?

Spearheaded by co-Investigators Erin Espelie (Assistant Professor, Film Studies Program and Department of Critical Media Practices), Tara Knight (Associate Professor, Department of Critical Media Practices), and Jorge Perez-Gallego (Scholar in Residence, Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences) NEST is a cross-campus network of faculty, students, centers and campus units that combine artistic practice and scientific research that explores our common and disparate ways of observing, recording, experimenting and knowing.

Our Board of Directors

Our Mind Trust

Our Team