IC News

Five distinct schools, one distinct vision. IC’s vision is about what happens when we explore, innovate, and lean into what could be possible. There is no better example of that than what is affectionately called PAWI—or, more formally, the Performing Arts Wellness Initiative.

IC Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Melanie Stein encourages cross-disciplinary partnerships between schools. It allows us to ask, “How can we help each other?” That is exactly the question PAWI is answering. The “we” in this equation is the School of Music, Theatre, and Dance (MTD) and the School of Health Sciences and Human Performance (HSHP).The PAWI program blends each school’s expertise to find the space in the Venn diagram where performance and wellness overlap.

The Ithaca College campus is one where cross-school partnerships are encouraged, and the emergence of PAWI is no different. Back in the 1990s, a walk-in Physical Therapy (PT) clinic was offered by HSHP to performing arts students, supervised by now-retired PT faculty Nick Quarrier. Performers in training would visit the clinic—staffed by PT students under the guidance of PT faculty—to get help with minor strains and pains. The goals were injury prevention and teaching injury self-management strategies. The treatments were usually isolated to one-time visits, and anything requiring more in-depth care was referred either to “regular” (scheduled) Physical Therapy session in the campus clinic or to practitioners off campus.

To answer those questions, Deans Moylan and TenEyck turned to Associate Professor and Chair of the Physical Therapy program Mike Costello, who had been running the PT walk-in clinic since 2017. They also brought in Clinical Professor and Chair of the Exercise Science and Athletic Training (AT) program, Chris Hummel.

This is where the innovation gets exciting. Dean Moylan explains, “Many of the motions that both theatre students and music students are doing are athletic in nature. There are lots of parallels.” Together, Hummel and Costello realized that “our students could really benefit from collaborative, interprofessional practice through this performing arts wellness initiative.”

In Spring 2025, the walk-in clinic had its first semester with combined PT and AT faculty (Costello, Hummel, and Teresa Chen) and PT and AT students, offering two sessions per week. PT and AT students worked as a team when a client came in. They problem-solved and created exercise plans and strategies for addressing pain or injury. That semester, they saw 49 students for a total of 79 visits.

Since expanding to two sessions per week (the clinic’s previous format offered only one), they have been able to provide more follow-up sessions. And of course, when persistent issues arise, the clinic offers referrals to specialists.

With this collaboration humming along, Dean TenEyck saw an opportunity to take it a step further. “Performing artists are a lot like athletes,” he said. “And we have all these structures built for athletes—their physical wellness, their mental wellness, their conditioning. How can we think about performing artists in a similar context?” It was the mental health and conditioning component that came next.

The Exercise and Sport Sciences master’s program in HSHP offers a concentration in mental performance. These faculty and students are now being integrated into the PAWI program. As Dean Moylan puts it, “Mental performance impacts all of us. Anyone in a leadership position, theatre and music students on stage, athletes on a field—we all experience things like performance anxiety.”

How do you handle interprofessional conflict in an ensemble? How do you work with an instructor in your studio when they’re pushing you hard? How do you handle anxiety and still perform at your best? If we replace “instructor” with “coach” and “ensemble” with “team,” the issues are identical.