Columbia Spotlight: Upcoming Events
The Dance Center’s Chicago Solo Spotlight Festival (March 13–15) highlights the art of solo performance, including renowned Chicago-based artist Nora Sharp's “Cosmic Docks.” Inspired by sci-fi futurism, Sharp's performance examines questions about queer and trans existence, aiming to chart a pathway beyond legibility. Photo by Daniel Patrick Borland.Learn more about our performance spaces at www.colum.edu/spotlight
Ongoing Events
Cecilia Beaven: Flickering Cocoon
On display through June 1
Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Avenue
Admission: Free
In “Flickering Cocoon,” artist and Columbia faculty member Cecilia Beaven creates a vibrant sanctuary where spirituality and physicality intertwine. Influenced by her Mexican heritage, her work explores life, death, and transformation with neon-hued imagery of animals, plants, and female forms, playfully embracing the cycle of life. Blending traditional illustration with modern murals, textiles, and sculpture, Beaven brings Mesoamerican myths to life and reinterprets Cipactli, a mythical crocodile, as a powerful symbol of creation.
January 2025
MARAÑA’S Organismo
January 23-25, 7:30 p.m.; January 25, 4 p.m.
The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago, 1306 S. Michigan Ave.
Purchase tickets through the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival box office
An immersion into an organism created from wool, sounds, colors, and textures combined with circus acrobatics, dance, rhythms, and music. Presented in partnership with the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival.
February 2025
InkFest
February 14-15, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.
Columbia College Chicago Student Center, 754 South Wabash Ave.
Admission: Free
The Illustration and Krafts (INK) Fest is an annual festival organized by the Illustration student group in collaboration with various campus support systems. Featuring an artist alley with works from over 90 student and alumni artists available for purchase, the event celebrates emerging illustrators, fosters networking opportunities, and highlights the talents of up-and-coming visual artists.
B-Series Festival: B-yond Borders
February 27-March 1
The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago, 1306 S. Michigan Ave.
Admission: TBA
Celebrate the kinships and global impact of Afrodiasporic street and social dances at B-yond Borders, co-curated by Daniel “BRAVEMONK” Haywood and Kelsa “K-Soul” Rieger-Haywood. This dynamic festival brings together guest artists, students, and community members for workshops, conversations, film screenings, and a dance jam featuring performances and battles. Highlights include Afro Dance pioneer Sarah Olaniran (Sayrah Chips) and influential local, regional, and student artists.
“Meanwhile” Film Screening and Director Q&A
February 24, 6:30 p.m.
Film Row Cinema, 1104 S. Wabash Ave.
Admission: Free
Columbia will host the first Chicago-area screening of “Meanwhile,” a thought-provoking documentary by Catherine Gund. The film weaves dance, music, and visual art together to reflect on collective action and resilience in uncertain times.
Jonathan McReynolds Residency Concert
February 28, 7 p.m.
Columbia College Chicago Music Center Concert Hall, 1014 S. Michigan Ave.
Admission: $20 public; $5 Columbia College Chicago students
Chicago-born Christian music artist McReynolds is known for his soulful voice and inspirational lyrics. He's collaborated with artists like Stevie Wonder and Justin Bieber and is a faculty member at Columbia College Chicago.
Musical Theatre Dance Cabaret
February 20-21, 7:30 p.m.
The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago, 1306 S. Michigan Ave.
Admission: Free
Dive into the newly created School of Theatre and Dance with student choreographers and performers from both Theatre and Dance bringing their original interpretations of classic musical theatre dance numbers.
March 2025
You on the Moors Now
March 5-7, 7:30 p.m.; March 8, 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.; March 12, 7:30 p.m., March 13, 7:30 p.m. (ASL-interpreted performance) March 14, 7:30 p.m.; March 15, 2 p.m.
Columbia College Chicago Getz Theatre Center, Sheldon Patinkin Theatre, 72 E. 11th St.
Admission: TBA
Four literary heroines of the nineteenth century set conventionalism ablaze when they turn down marriage proposals from their equally famous gentlemen callers. What results is a confluence of love, anger, grief, and bloodshed, as the ensemble struggles to reconcile romantic ideologies of the past with their modern ideas of courtship. Everything you’ve learned about love from the pages of Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and Little Women is turned upside down in this grand theatrical battle royale.
Efroymson Creative Writing Reading Series: Alumni Reading featuring Lor Clincy and Jeff Hoffmann
March 12, 5:30-7 p.m. and online
Admission: Free
Columbia College Chicago Conaway Center, 1104 S. Wabash, first floor
Lor Clincy is a Chicago-based poet and Columbia College Chicago MFA candidate who explores deep, personal experiences in her work, often addressing grief, loss, and the complexities of identity as a Black woman. Her poetry reflects on her upbringing and African American experiences, requiring readers to engage with perspectives outside the norm. Jeff Hoffmann’s debut novel “Other People’s Children” was published by Simon & Schuster in 2021. His second novel, “Like It Never Happened,” is set to be released in March 2024. He has received the Madison Review’s Chris O’Malley Prize in Fiction and was a finalist for the Missouri Review’s Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize.
The Chicago Solo Spotlight Festival
March 13-15, 7:30 p.m.
Admission: Festival Pass: $50; single tickets: $30 (public), $10 (non-Columbia students), free for Columbia students
The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago, 1306 S. Michigan Ave.
The Chicago Solo Spotlight Festival celebrates the transformative power of solo performance with two world premieres by acclaimed Chicago artists Jenn Freeman | Po’Chop and Nora Sharp. This series explores the evolving solo form through intimate storytelling, multimedia artistry, and experimental dance, featuring Freeman’s exploration of Black women’s history and agency in “THICK: a crumbling freak show” and Sharp’s sci-fi-inspired “Cosmic Docks”, a journey through queer identity and personal history.
April 2025
Body/Matter
April 5, 6-8 p.m. | On display until May 5
International Museum of Surgical Science, 1524 N. Lake Shore Drive
Admission: Free
This exhibition includes twelve wearable artworks by Columbia students that consider the body as an object and subject of medical inquiry. Drawing upon research conducted in the International Museum of Surgical Science archives, the designers explore concepts of bodily normalcy, fashion as prosthetic, and surgical voyeurism, among others. While cloth is the ‘matter’ of fashion design, flesh is the ‘matter’ of surgical science. Together, cloth and flesh function as the fragile barrier between the self and society; and these works ask us to contemplate where one ends and the other begins. Curated by Lauren Downing Peters.
Alium Release Party
April 17, 3:30 p.m.
Admission: Free
Columbia College Chicago Conaway Center, 1104 S. Wabash, first floor
“Allium, A Journal of Poetry & Prose” is a multi-genre print and online journal published by Columbia College Chicago’s School of Communication and Culture. Three issues are published yearly: two digital issues in the Fall and Summer and one print issue in the Spring. This event will feature Columbia faculty member, writer, and poet Lisa Fishman, plus contributors from the Spring 2025 issue.
May 2025
RENT
May 1, 7:30 p.m.; May 2, 7:30 p.m.; May 3, 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.; May 7, 7:30 p.m.; May 8, 7:30 p.m. (ASL-interpreted performance) May 9, 7:30 p.m.; May 10, 2 p.m.
Columbia College Chicago Getz Theatre Center, Courtyard Theatre, 72 E. 11th St.
Admission: TBA
“RENT” follows a year in the life of a group of impoverished young artists and musicians struggling to survive and create in New York's Lower East Side, under the shadow of HIV/AIDS.