Students who take classes in dance and/or pursue a dance minor immerse themselves in a program that envisions dance as an integral part of the robust, rigorous, liberal arts curriculum at Davidson. Dance classes focus on theory as well as practice, incorporating the varied physical, cultural, historic, and social attributes of the subject into each course. Classes are open to students of all backgrounds and at all levels of experience.

The Music Department is committed to teaching students how to think, create, perform, and communicate, and to do so in a critical, expressive, and articulate manner. For major and non-major alike, this curriculum provides challenging encounters with the multi-faceted perspectives inherent in the study of music. Our classes cover a wide span of musical interests including world music, film music, American musical theatre, traditional music of the southern Appalachians, music of Latin America, opera, conducting, digital composition, and more.

Through collaboration, interdisciplinarity, community building, and an embrace of innovative artistic and teaching practices, we prepare students to be empathetic artist-scholar-citizens who use their skills to engage with the most pressing concerns of our world. We welcome students from across the campus to participate in our classes, productions and programming.

Students can earn a Bachelor of Arts degree with an emphasis in either art history or studio art, and the two disciplines are closely entwined. Our goal is to encourage creative approaches to learning in all disciplines as part of the broader liberal arts curriculum. Through state-of-the-art facilities offered by the Belk Visual Arts Center and the availability of gifted professors who are also committed and successful career artists and art historians, the department provides students with a challenging opportunity for aesthetic growth and personal intellectual development.

For this reason, the Film and Media Studies interdisciplinary minor compliments a wide variety of majors. The interdisciplinary minor promotes the development of multimedia literacy, providing you with an understanding of the history, theory, language and cultural aspects of film and other audio-visual media. Combining introductory and advanced courses in Film and Media Studies with electives from the humanities and the social sciences, the interdisciplinary minor will help you become a sensitive reader of film and media while increasing your insight into one of the principal forms of art and communication in the contemporary era.