University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA)

Winston-Salem raised nearly $1 million in a two-day phone campaign to land this school. That tells you something about the city before you ever set foot on campus.

America's first state-supported arts conservatory, UNCSA was established by the North Carolina General Assembly in 1963 and opened here in 1965. The idea originated with composer Vittorio Giannini, who brought it to then-Governor Terry Sanford and enlisted author John Ehle and others to make it real. Giannini became the school's first president, shaped its founding vision, and served until his death in November 1966. The school joined the University of North Carolina System in 1972 and took its current name in 2008.

Five schools — Dance, Design and Production, Drama, Filmmaking, and Music — operate under one roof, which is rarer than it sounds. Students get in by audition and portfolio review. The school generates around 300 productions, concerts, and film screenings in a single year, most of them open to the public at low or no cost. That output reaches industry: alumni include Jada Pinkett Smith, Danny Glover, and Mary-Louise Parker. The drama and filmmaking programs draw consistent recognition from major entertainment trade publications.

The school owns and operates the Stevens Center in downtown Winston-Salem, which anchors the relationship between campus and city. UNCSA doesn't exist in isolation — it runs programming outward into the community it was built to serve.

The school's history carries real difficulty alongside its achievements — documented abuses, a significant legal settlement — and those facts belong to the full story. What was also built here, over six decades, is the thing worth seeing: a public institution that trained working artists from a city that bet on the idea before the institution existed.

Go to a performance. The students are training for professional careers, not rehearsing for some future life. This is the life, happening now.