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RIT students will have more opportunities to flex their creative muscles outside of the classroom through a new program called ArtEx, housed within RIT’s College of Art and Design. The new program creates opportunities for students outside of the college to engage with the resources and expertise available within the School for American Crafts and School of Art.

Retrograde, a classical rock band formed about a year and a half ago with five RIT students, won best performance and a $500 prize in this year’s Ovation: RIT Performing Arts Showcase, held Friday night in Ingle Auditorium.

Voting is open to select finalists in this year’s Imagine RIT: Creativity and Innovation Festival poster contest. Seventy-five poster designs, intended to capture the spirit of the annual festival, were submitted for consideration.

Thomas Zurbuchen, astrophysicist and the longest continually serving associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate in NASA’s history, will be the keynote speaker for RIT’s Academic Convocation ceremony starting at 10 a.m. on Friday, May 12, in the Gordon Field House and Activities Center.

More students involved in performing arts are currently enrolled at RIT than ever before. This year’s class includes a record 482 new students who received Performing Arts Scholarships.

The crown jewel of RIT’s Center for Media, Arts, Games, Interaction & Creativity, MAGIC Spell Studios brings together the university’s academic strengths in game design and development, film and animation, and digital media, with a commercialization focus that provides Hollywood-scale virtual production experiences for students and clients.

A 750-seat music performance theater will be constructed on the RIT campus to offer a venue for musical theater productions. The new building will be the first of two theaters in a performing arts center. The first phase will be an iconic building with more than 40,000 square feet of space, with anticipated completion in 2025.

As students head to class each day, a new showpiece is rising at the center of RIT’s campus. The Student Hall for Exploration and Development (SHED)—which was first announced in 2017 and funded in part by a $50 million gift from alumnus Austin McChord ’09—is a multi-use complex that will showcase RIT’s technology, the arts, and design. The SHED is on track to open this fall.

RIT Dubai’s new campus earned international recognition for its innovative design. Newsweek magazine named RIT Dubai’s Innovation Center to its “Quirkiest College Campuses” list in August.

RIT student Jake Downie has been “all in” for the past few years when working to advance JDocs, a startup he created with fellow computer science student Artem Goncharov. And now, a JDocs product, FlexFile, is making waves in the legal industry. Last week, FlexFile became a semifinalist to compete in ABA Techshow’s Startup Alley competition.

The Vignelli Center for Design Studies has appointed RZLBD (Reza Aliabadi) as the inaugural Vignelli Center Designer in Residence. This position was created to assist with an upcoming campus project to design and build a series of outdoor interactive exhibits tentatively titled the RIT Museumscape.

Students who took part in Metaproject 13 will have their designs showcased as part of the 2023 New York City Design Week courtesy of their client, Lazzoni. In the fall, students spent the semester working to design seating solutions for the alumnus-owned international furniture company. All of the designs presented will be prototyped by Lazzoni, a first in Metaproject’s history.