The 2024 Creative Arts Awardees have been announced by the UW–Madison Division of the Arts. Laura Schwendinger, Professor of Composition, leads a distinguished list of faculty, staff, and student recipients who will be honored publicly at a special gala event on May 2, 2024 at the Hamel Music Center. Peter Dominguez, Professor of Double Bass and Jazz Studies, will be awarded with an Emily Mead Baldwin Award in the Creative Arts, and Magdalena Sas, a PhD candidate in cello performance, will be awarded with a Graduate Student Creative Arts Award.

Schwendinger will receive the Creative Arts Award, which recognizes and honors extraordinary artistic projects and endeavors of the highest quality carried out by tenured members of the UW–Madison arts faculty.  Schwendinger is the award-winning composer of Artemisia, winner of the 2023 American Academy of Arts and Letters Charles Ives Opera award, one of the largest such awards to composers of opera, was the first composer to win the Berlin Prize in 1999 and is a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow.

The Creative Arts Awards program enables the Arts Division to recognize and support research and outreach in all areas of the creative arts at UW–Madison. Eight awards are open to a variety of arts practitioners, researchers, students (both undergraduate and graduate), staff and faculty from arts academic departments, co-curricular arts units and programs. The gala awards ceremony, presented by the Division of Arts, is a celebration of diverse and groundbreaking creative arts research that spans disciplines and departments across UW–Madison.