WINSTON-SALEM – When Susan Ruskin came to the UNC School of the Arts, she found a hive of cultural energy.

“I found it to be a place that was extremely exciting to me from the first minute that I walked on the campus,” Ruskin, a former Hollywood producer who’s now Dean of UNCSA’s School of Filmmaking, says in the accompanying video.

“As soon as I came here and I saw the dancers walking with their toes pointed out… and the cellos on the backs of the music students, and the drama students doing some sort of fight exercise, and the filmmakers, I went, ‘OK – I get it.’”

The School of the Arts emphasizes that it is a conservatory where students do intensive work on a specific discipline with professors at the top of their professions.  The school feeds a $700 billion arts and entertainment industry and has generated its share of star alumni in the process.

“We were created very purposefully,” says Interim Provost David English, “to help uplift the state of North Carolina and the South, to be a cultural resource, and to provide students who have a talent and a passion for one of these areas of the arts to be able to pursue that.”