Students Explore New Cultures via RISD Global Wintersession Travel Courses

While Providence quiets down between the fall and spring semesters, students continue to learn, make, and iterate in studios on campus and across oceans. Throughout Wintersession, students immersed themselves in place-based study led by RISD faculty members, engaging directly with artists, scientists, craftspeople, and community leaders. This year’s travel courses spanned Japan, Taiwan, Ghana, South Africa, France, and Mexico. 

“This Wintersession’s travel courses offered unique interdisciplinary research and making opportunities for students and faculty alike,” says Sarah Croft, director of RISD Global. “Programs explored local traditions in tandem with modern adaptation, with investigations in subjects such as neuroscience, conservation, and evidence-based design. The work students created highlights the essential function art and design can play in solving universal challenges, as well as enhancing lived experiences all over the globe.”

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Ceramics Professor Shoji Satake, who taught courses in Japan and Taiwan, appreciates the way traveling changed the students. “It opened them up and helped them connect more deeply with people and cultures different from their own,” he recalls. Just as meaningful for the group were the unintended moments: students skipping rocks for the first time, partaking in chanoyu (a Japanese tea ceremony), and trying unfamiliar foods. 

The course in Taiwan focused on new methods and technologies unique to Chinese ceramics. Field trips included a visit to a Ceramics Sculpture Park in Yingge, the National Palace Museum in Taipei, and Majia Township for a tour of the Taiwan Indigenous Culture Park. 

Across the Pacific Ocean in Mexico, Associate Professor Adela Goldbard and Professor Ijlal Muzaffar taught filmmaking together. Students created a series of experimental short films reflecting on the unfamiliar environments they were exploring and their interactions with the local communities. Field trips included the Teotihuacan pyramids, Tlatelolco’s Plaza de las Tres Culturas, and art fairs during Mexico City’s lively Art Week.

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In Provence, France, Illustration faculty member Catherine Huang 19 IL led a course on the intersection of illustration, history, and neuroscience. Every week began with a guided didactic neuroscience lesson from Brown University’s Nicholas Tolley focused on the biological underpinnings of sensation, choice, memory, and perception. 

Huang says the students made multiple connections during the trip and were spiritually fortified by the environment. “Our plein air painting sessions in the beautiful Provençal landscape, for example, were fulfilling and calm,” she notes. 

A continent away, in Ghana, Africa, Architecture faculty member Junko Yamamoto and the Landscape Architecture department’s Lara Davis led a course exploring traditional building sites, energy inequalities, and local building materials, such as clay, red earth, thatch, and timber. The class visited the Nubuke Foundation—a visual art and cultural institution—as well as a brick factory, the Bonwire Kente Weaving Centre, and the Dikan Center, which is home to the continent’s largest collection of photography and art books.

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Yamamoto describes teaching abroad as collaborative and immersive. “Students learned how earth behaves in heat and humidity, what tools and labor are available, and how construction knowledge is shared locally,” she explains.

Further south, in South Africa and Namibia, faculty member Lucy Spelman and recent alum Nellie Geraghty-Scharf MFA 24 IL taught a multidisciplinary course on biodiversity examining how art, science, and traditional ecological knowledge shape environmental decision making. “If we took every student to South Africa, each of them would make something different of the experience,” says Spelman. “The course stimulates curiosity, a sense of connection, and compassion for other creatures.”  

Kaylee Pugliese / Top image: Students paint in a field in Mexico
February 19, 2026