Creativity & Agency in the Age of AI: Using genAI Productively and Ethically in Creative Practice and Teaching

Mar 6, 2025 3-4:15pm ET / 12 noon-1:15pm PT / 9-10:15pm CET

Generative AI—love it or hate it—is transforming the creative landscape. It challenges long-held notions of control, agency, and creative burden, while amplifying core elements of creative work like iteration and divergent thinking. 

The interactive conversation in this webinar invites participants to explore how artificial intelligence and machine learning redefine our understanding of creativity and human expression, as we consider the role of AI as enhancement for creative practice workflows and how to teach these new creative processes. Panelists will provide current resources to stay informed about the rapidly evolving AI for the Arts landscape.

How can AI help us tell more compelling stories, design more imaginative visuals, and redefine what it means to be creative in a digital age? What do AI technologies reveal about the uniquely human aspects of storytelling, performance, and the creative process itself? How can we teach skills for using generative AI in ethical and empowering ways? 

This webinar is inspired by contributions in the a2ru/UNLV collaboration special issue Artificial Intelligence and Possible Futures for the Arts in Tradition-Innovations in Arts, Design, and Media Higher Education, and the a2ru AI in the Arts working group organized by Aaron Knochel and Daragh Byrne. 

Key Takeaways

• Understand how generative AI is reshaping creative processes.
• Gain insight into the innovation landscape of AI and its applications in visual and narrative arts and how to teach them.
• Learn to evaluate AI tools for creative projects.
• Reflect critically on the intersection of human creativity and machine capabilities.
• Discover ways to lean into human creativity when working with AI tools. 
• Find resources to stay informed about AI tools. 

Audience

This webinar is ideal for creatives, educators, technologists, and anyone curious about the evolving relationship between AI and human creativity. Whether you are a designer, performer, writer, or educator, this session provides a platform to rethink your role in a world increasingly shaped by AI-enhanced workflows for creative practice.

Join us to discuss how AI tools are enhancing human creativity and ways to teach creative processes. 

Registered participants can receive a summary of the panel conversation. To support authentic and critical discussion, a full Zoom recording will not be available. 

Registration

All a2ru webinars are free for a2ru individual members, as well as those affiliated as students, faculty, and staff at a2ru member institutions and departments. Please use your institutional email address while registering at the link below.

Member Registration

a2ru webinars are $20 for non-members and $10 for non-member students.

Non-Member Registration

Panelists

Dr. Christine Liao

Christine Liao, Ph.D., is a professor and program coordinator of the Art Education MAT program at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her research areas include media arts, digital performance, theorizing virtual body and identity, exploring interactions between virtual and real, STEAM, AI and technology in art education, and intercultural education. Her recent project is to investigate technology, media arts, and AI in art education and to develop critical AI pedagogy for art education. In addition, she is the leader of the UNCW faculty-led international program for Japan Study Abroad. She speaks three languages and is passionate about introducing international experience and culture to students.

 

Nick Briz 

Nick Briz is an internationally recognized new-media artist, educator and organizer. His work investigates the promises and perils of living in an increasingly digital and networked world. He is an active participant in various online communities and conversations including glitch art, net art, remix culture, digital literacy, hacktivism and digital rights. He’s an Assistant Instructional Professor in the Media Art and Design program at the University of Chicago. He’s also a freelance creative technologist and co-founder of netizen.org a nonprofit focused on digital literacy and digital culture.

 

 

Joshua Vermillion

Joshua Vermillion is an award-winning designer, scholar, and educator. As a design technologist he uses machines to augment his creative work, research, and teaching. Joshua is an associate professor in the School of Architecture at UNLV, where he has co-edited two books and has spoken, published, and presented peer-reviewed creative research worldwide. His creative and pedagogical interests include: artificial intelligence and machine learning; computational, parametric and algorithmic design; digital fabrication tools and techniques; and robotics. Since the recent advent of AI diffusion models, Joshua has been very active in ‘interrogating’ these AI technologies in order to come to creative terms with them, generating thousands of visuals of extraordinary spatial ‘imaginaries’ along with a continuing series of time-based AI-scripted generative sketches and animations. This work recently led to collaborating on the first AI / photography hybrid fashion magazine cover and editorial for Harper’s BAZAAR, and a renewed focus on creative work and speaking roles with a number of companies and organizations, including Samsung, Microsoft, Jaguar Land Rover, ELLE Décor Magazine, Architectural Digest, and others.

Links + Social Media:

https://www.instagram.com/joshuavermillion/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuavermillion/

https://linktr.ee/josh.vermillion

Organizers

Dr. Oscar Keyes (he, him, his)

Oscar Keyes (he/him/his) is the Multimedia Teaching & Learning Librarian at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA, where he is also pursuing a Ph.D. in Art Education. His current research investigates the emergence of the camera in education and explores how that historical context might help us address teaching with emerging technologies today. His pedagogical approach considers how social issues can be critically scaffolded into technical instruction for various digital tools, such as image-editing software, game engines, and generative artificial intelligence. He has taught (new and old) media arts in various spaces, including higher education, K-12 schools, summer camps, community-based arts organizations, and detention centers. When he’s not busy teaching, Keyes still makes movies with his friends, having worked on award-winning short and feature-length films.

 

Dr. Yvonne Houy

Dr. Yvonne Houy is the learning technologist for the UNLV College of Fine Arts – supporting faculty in Architecture, Art, Entertainment Engineering Design, Dance, Film, Music, and Theatre – the Co-Chair of the UNLV Faculty Senate AI Task Force, and a UNLV AI Fellow in Administrative Innovation. As an Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru) executive committee emerita and special advisor, she is active in supporting transdisciplinary Arts and research integration in higher education, and is the editor of the peer-reviewed open access eJournal Tradition-Innovations in Arts, Design, and Media Higher Education, a collaboration between a2ru, the College of Fine Arts, and UNLV Libraries. 

After receiving her Ph.D. at Cornell University, she followed her interest in online learning technologies and computer programming to become a learning technologist and professional development facilitator. She enjoys teaching media studies, cultural studies and history courses, as well as no-prerequisite courses for artists and designers on using coding and mobile app development as creative “canvas.” Her peer-reviewed publications focus on propaganda and social control through media and emerging technologies, resistance techniques to such social control mechanisms, and technology and sustainability. 

She practices Aikido, a martial art focused on conflict de-escalation, and is a trained mediator.