At the University of the Arts, different modes of learning and research coexist and converge — both research on art and arts research. Research on art, with its long academic tradition, involves critical reflection on artistic phenomena, with the aim of historicizing, interpreting, or analyzing them through diverse approaches, perspectives, and theoretical frameworks, including philosophy, aesthetics, the sociology of art, anthropology, the psychology of art, semiotics, art history, and musicology. Arts research, by contrast, draws on distinct ways of investigating, inquiring, and generating knowledge through methods rooted in exploration, practice, and experimentation, with the goal of arriving at original outcomes oriented toward artistic creation. Both pathways to knowledge are equally legitimate across all areas of the University of the Arts, and each enriches the other.
The university directs its teaching and research activities toward creative artistic production and critical reflection on the arts, fostering the development of diverse aesthetic concepts and criteria, nurturing creative talent and the full range of expressive capacities, and connecting art to social transformation.
The University of the Arts is guided by the principles of responsible autonomy, shared governance, equal opportunity, quality, relevance, comprehensiveness, and self-determination in artistic production, thought, and knowledge, as established in the Organic Law of Higher Education.
The university aligns its programs and teaching activities with the goals and objectives of the National Development Plan, national policies on culture and cultural heritage, and policies, programs, and projects related to science, technology, innovation, and ancestral knowledge.
Mission
To train arts professionals with a thorough command of their field, an openness to interdisciplinary principles and practices, critical thinking, and a commitment to social transformation enabling them to produce artistic work that contributes to the advancement of knowledge, the promotion of culture, and the development of Ecuadorian society and the creative economies.
Vision
By 2035, UArtes will offer a comprehensive, diversified, relevant, and high-quality range of academic offerings spanning technical, undergraduate, and graduate programs, grounded in a model of higher education in the arts that is recognized both nationally and internationally. The university will generate a body of innovative knowledge and artistic practices, along with community engagement processes that contribute to the country's knowledge base and development. It will maintain modern infrastructure and equipment, provide access to new media, and support its operations through intelligent and interactive systems.
Institutional Values
- Interculturality: Promotes a model of cultural coexistence, learning, and knowledge development grounded in respect, acceptance, and meaningful engagement with difference.
- Integral Equity: Guarantees equal opportunities for peoples and nationalities, women and men, persons of diverse sexual orientations, persons with disabilities and special abilities, and both rural and urban communities.
- Critical Thinking: Fosters respect for diverse opinions, expressions, and creative works, providing the conditions for reflection and the exercise of critique and self critique that bring to light the ethical, political, and sociocultural implications, limitations, causes, and consequences of artistic work.
- Innovation: Shifts, reframes, and reinvents perspectives, processes, outcomes, and forms of expression and creation in an effective and integrated manner.
- Decoloniality: Entails an awareness of the processes of coloniality of being, power, knowledge, and vision, and puts forward alternative responses and solutions rooted in local experience in relation to dominant hegemonic frameworks, affirming and giving visibility to the diversity of traditional and contemporary knowledge, as well as its holistic and integrative capacities.
- Artistic Freedom: A necessary condition and driving force of creative expression free from political, religious, and sociocultural censorship or self censorship that guarantees symbolic expression beyond any external constraint, including market pressures.
- Social Commitment: An assumed responsibility to contribute to the social development of the country.
- Continuous Improvement: Maintains a stance of ongoing self assessment and improvement with the aim of remaining at the forefront of university quality.
- Promotion and Respect for Cultural Rights: Guarantees the exercise of cultural rights under equal conditions.
- Interdisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity: Creatively connects disciplines and methodologies, exploring and proposing academic experiences that go beyond the boundaries of any individual discipline.
- Community engaged inter learning: Regards the organic curricular connection with community inter learning experiences as a fundamental axis for fostering students' social awareness and for exploring artistic initiatives that are meaningful to all.