Center for Creativity, Design, and the Arts

The Kelley and C.T. Fitzpatrick Center for Creativity, Design, and the Arts provides arts programming and opportunities for engagement with the arts both on and off campus, while serving as a hub and connector for all arts disciplines and activities on campus. 

From our art galleries to our performing arts venues, arts events occur across Sweet Briar’s stunning campus and enrich both the academic lives of our students as well as the broader community. In addition to the programming provided by the center itself, every year our galleries program a variety of exhibitions, the Babcock Season and the Gager Concert Series bring performing artists to campus, and the longstanding Writers Series has welcomed distinguished authors from across the country for more than 30 years.

Students work with our faculty in exceptional facilities across all of the arts disciplines at Sweet Briar: studio art, art history, English and creative writing, dance, music, and theatre. We host writers from The New Yorker every year in conjunction with Sweet Briar’s Mindful Writer course, as well as a campus-wide Common Read capped by an on-campus reading. Past Common Read writers include Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass), and Chloé Cooper Jones (Easy Beauty). 

Arts adventures to Washington, D.C., Richmond, Va. and Charlottesville, Va. allow our students to engage with world-class visual art, music, theatre, dance, and writing in specially curated trips with experienced faculty.

In 2023, Sweet Briar launched the first Sweet Briar Summer: Arts and Writing Retreat, an annual weekend of workshops, readings, and performance designed to inspire creativity, joy, and reflection.