Roger Glass Center for the Arts: A Campus, Community Hub Two Years In 

Photo via the University of Dayton website

Jake Villari  | Contributing Writer

DAYTON, Ohio — Two years after opening, the Roger Glass Center for the Arts is beginning to show the impact university leaders envisioned: a space for performances, classes and community connection.

Since its debut, the Roger Glass Center has hosted film festivals, documentary premieres, author talks, concerts, art exhibitions and classes, drawing praise from students, faculty, alumni and community members. University leaders say the center is living up to its original purpose by giving students world-class facilities and strengthening the connection between campus and Dayton.

Dayton Planning Division Manager Tony Kroeger said the Glass Center was approved as a planned development zoning overlay, PD-182, by the Dayton City Commission in 2021, after much discussion about the loss of the ginkgo trees along Main Street. Kroeger believes the center’s location is significant because of its proximity to onMain and the Main, Stewart and Brown street corridors, which he hopes will help strengthen the Glass Center’s role as a connector between the university and the city.

Chad Painter, associate professor and chair of the Department of Communication at UD, said the response to the Glass Center has been overwhelmingly positive since it opened. He said the space is seen as a “jewel” by students, faculty, staff and alumni, and that the best way to explain its impact is simply to show it to people.

Painter said students were energized by the opening, while alumni are often impressed by what the facility offers now. That reaction has helped him confirm the center’s value not just as a performance venue, but as a space that allows UD and the community to interact and experience the arts together.

The Glass Center has also become a place for public events that help broaden its reach beyond campus. Painter pointed to the Dayton Independent Film Festival, a student documentary premiere and an author conversation hosted in collaboration with the Jewish Community Center and UD’s Department of Music as examples of events that have been well received by both the university and the greater Dayton community.

University of Dayton President Eric Spina said the center was designed to be more than a performance venue. “Most importantly, we wanted it to become a true home for our students,” he said. “A home that provides the best possible environment for their creative pursuits.”

Spina said the broader goal was to create what he described as a “two-way street” between UD and the community, with public arts events available to campus audiences and student events open to community members. In his view, the center has met that goal.

“It has truly achieved these goals,” Spina said. “It is thrilling for me to see our students perform and work at the Roger Glass Center, using world-class facilities to showcase the incredible talent that our students have. It is also exciting to see how the community has engaged in the Roger Glass Center.”

One of the biggest surprises, Spina said, has been the size of the audiences the center is drawing, noting that the building’s accessibility for both foot and car traffic has helped boost attendance for performances.

The center’s impact can also be seen in the classroom and behind the scenes, where students are learning valuable skills in a professional production environment. Greg Kennedy, a media production professor who teaches several production courses in the Glass Center, said the new setup has improved the overall workflow by bringing everything into one space. 

“Just having the podcast room has been huge because when we didn’t, students had to go all the way to ArtStreet or Kettering Labs for any voiceover or audio work,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy also pointed to the loss of the old Nexus server as a setback for students, saying it had given everyone access to a shared 40-terabyte server for storing footage and other project files. He said the new server led to the loss of some student work, class lessons and examples, but overall workflow has improved by keeping key production resources in one place and adding more workspaces, an editing suite and a more advanced studio space.

For Kennedy and other professors, the value of the Glass Center is not just in what it contains, but in what it enables. Students are able to work in a space designed for collaboration, experimentation and professional-level production, which gives them a clearer sense of how their skills translate into the real world.

Senior media production student Jake Wozniak said classes with Kennedy have helped give him a more practical understanding of post-production. After taking Kennedy’s post-production class last semester, Wozniak is now in his animation effects course, where he said the work builds directly on skills students can use in professional media settings.

Wozniak’s experience reflects one of the Glass Center’s biggest strengths: it gives students a chance to learn in a space that feels closer to a real production environment than a traditional classroom. For students preparing to enter the media industry, that combination of instruction and hands-on work with world-class technology can help make the transition from student projects to professional content feel more natural.

As the Roger Glass Center enters its third year, university leaders are presenting it as a success not only because it is busy, but because it is being used in the way they hoped it would be: as a home for students, a venue for the arts and a shared space for the campus and community.