Community Engagement for Sustainability
With creative works, culture and heritage programs, libraries, performance venues and green spaces, FIU is a resource for our students and our communities. This also includes two heritage museums, an art museum and multiple gallery spaces. We invite you to explore all FIU has to offer in support of SUSTAINABLE CITIES AND COMMUNITIES.
Fostering Arts, Culture and Heritage
As Miami's public research university, Florida International University offers unique programming reflective of the diversity and heritage that make up our communities. Our campuses and locations throughout South Florida are open to the public. With art, music, entertainment and cultural experiences, FIU has something for everyone!
The Wolfsonian
Located in South Beach’s historic Art Deco District, The Wolfsonian–FIU explores the inventive and provocative modern world. With 200,000 items in its permanent collection, the museum contains a vast universe of ideas — from household appliances that sped the pace of work to propaganda that turned the tides of war.
Jewish Museum of Florida
The Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU is the only museum dedicated to telling the story of more than 250 years of Florida Jewish history, arts and culture, with a growing collection of more than 100,000 items. The art deco building features 80 stained-glass windows, a copper dome, and a marble bimah and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
FIU Libraries
The Green Library and Hubert Library hold nearly 2 million print volumes and provide access to more than 100,000 journals, magazines and newspapers. FIU Libraries Special Collections house materials and artifacts from the 15th to 21st centuries, spanning the history and culture of Latin America, the Caribbean and Florida. The libraries are open to the public.
Center for Humanities in an Urban Environment
Uniting humanities scholars at FIU, the center conducts research and provides community programming focused on the interactions of people, our built environment and the wilderness next door. The center serves as a model for how the humanities can foster innovative engagement strategies to respond to key issues of our times.
Exile Studies Program
The Exile Studies Program offers both a certificate program for degree-seeking students and community events for the general public. The program explores the far-reaching universal implications of exile through literature, which often synthesizes and particularizes the rich often traumatic experiences of transplantation.
Global Indigenous Forum
The forum brings global indigenous issues, voices and awareness to the FIU campus and community through activities and academic programs, including courses, dialogues, conferences, media, exhibits, research publications and action-oriented activities.
Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center
With one of the largest concentrations of Latin American and Caribbean scholars in the U.S., LACC features programming on migration, policy, trade, indigenous cultures, economics and democratization, sustainable development, religion, and the arts. LACC is a U.S. Department of Education National Resource Center.
Cuban Research Institute
Just 228 miles from Havana and amidst the largest Cuban diaspora in the world, FIU's Cuban Research Institute encourages original research and interdisciplinary teaching, hosts a robust calender of community programming, and promotes the development of library holdings and collections on Cuba and its diaspora.
CasaCuba
CasaCuba at FIU brings together scholars, policymakers, business leaders, students and the community to realize a multidimensional Cuban cultural center and think tank that facilitates the discussion and study of Cuban affairs and the celebration of the Cuban heritage.
Campus Monuments
FIU's campuses feature multiple cultural monuments including busts of Martin Luther King Jr. and Cuban activist Jose Marti, and a replica of the Statue of Liberty. The university's Peace Monument, which states "Peace must prevail" in 16 languages, was blessed by the Dalai Lama in 1999.
Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum
Hosting more than 35,000 visitors every year, FIU's Frost Art Museum provides free community access to world-class art, spanning cultures and time periods. Its 6,000-piece permanent collection includes pieces ranging from pre-Colombian art to modern works by contemporary Latin America and the Caribbean artists.
Did you know?
The historic buildings that make up FIU's Jewish Museum of Florida originally served as synagogues for Miami Beach's first Jewish congregation.
Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum
Hosting more than 35,000 visitors every year, FIU's Frost Art Museum provides free community access to world-class art, spanning cultures and time periods. Its 6,000-piece permanent collection includes pieces ranging from pre-Colombian art to modern works by contemporary Latin America and the Caribbean artists.
Miami Beach Urban Studios
The FIU School of Architecture Miami Beach Urban Studios (MBUS) features three art galleries that showcase contemporary art from international artists, FIU faculty, staff and students. The galleries regularly host performances, lectures, panel discussions and other cultural activities.
Sculpture Park
Art in public places has been integral to FIU since the establishment of the university in 1972. FIU’s Avenue of the Arts, where the Frost Art Museum and FIU's Sculpture Park both reside, is the focal point of the university’s public art program, which includes art installations throughout FIU's campuses and community locations.
Wertheim Performing Arts Center
The Herbert and Nicole Wertheim Performing Arts Center, home of the FIU School of Music and Department of Theatre, has hosted hundreds of performances and events along while showcasing thousands of costumes and set pieces since the venue's opening. Its annual slate of programming, including theater performances and musical concerts are open to the public.
FIU Theater
FIU Theatre produces as many as five plays every year, spanning genres, historical eras and styles. All plays are performed, designed, and built by students and faculty in the Department of Theater and performed at The Wertheim Performing Arts Center, a professional theatre venue with a 200-seat proscenium theater and a 120-seat black box theater.
FIU Music
The Herbert and Nicole Wertheim School of Music & Performing Arts produces an array of programming including musical concerts, annual music festivals and an hour-long radio show that airs every week on WDNA, Miami's top jazz station. The school also features a choral ensemble that invites community members with a passion for singing to join.
Creative Writing Program
One of the top Creative Writing programs in the nation, FIU faculty include a MacArthur Genius, New York Times best-selling authors, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a National Humanities Medal honoree and U.S. Presidential Inaugural Poet. The program offers community events throughout the year including its signature Lawrence A. Sanders Award for Fiction ceremony.
Did you know?
FIU's Frost Art Museum was designed by Yann Weymouth, architect of the Grand Louvre Pyramid and the Salvador Dalí Museum.
FIU is a Tree Campus USA
Florida International University is the first university in Florida to earn the Tree Campus USA designation from the Arbor Day Foundation for our commitment to trees on campus.
Maintaining green spaces for FIU and the community
Florida International University green spaces are uniquely South Florida including a mangrove forest, a nature trail, butterfly gardens, an 11-acre pine rockland nature preserve, and a curated palmetum — one of the largest university collections of palm trees in the United States.
Nature Preserve
The FIU Nature Preserve is an 11-acre environmental education and recreation on-campus green space. It features walking trails and historic geologic formations throughout its three distinct ecosystems and provides habitat for 13 endangered plants, 15 threatened plants, and another 238 plants and animals that call the preserve home.
Palmetum
FIU features one of the largest university collections of palm trees in the United States. What began as a reforestation effort after Hurricane Andrew has grown into a showcase of the great diversity that exists within the palm family. More than 60 species are featured on campus along with educational signage throughout.
Learn about the Palmetum's history
Campus Lawns
FIU's two primary campuses feature hilly open, green spaces. They serve as ideal locations for bird watching, people watching, club events, studying, a picnic or even a quick nap under a shady tree. The lawns have even hosted movies under the stars for FIU and the community.
BBC Nature Trail
Wrapping around FIU's Biscayne Bay Campus and running partly alongside Biscayne Bay, the three-mile trek is a master class in plant and wildlife native to Florida. Birds such as the belted kingfisher and roseate spoonbill are often visible from the trail, as well as butterfly species including monarchs and sulphurs.
Mangrove Forest
FIU's Biscayne Bay Campus is surrounded by mangrove forests on the north, northeast, and west, and the Biscayne Bay Aquatic Preserve on the south and southeast. For more than a decade, FIU has led the Adopt a Mangrove initiative, planting thousands of mangroves here and throughout South Florida.
Butterfly Gardens
On FIU's campuses, butterfly gardens provide refuge, sustenance and and place to lay eggs for the important pollinators. Many of the gardens have been planted with the help of community volunteers and attract a variety of species including monarchs, queens, sulphurs and atalas.
International Center for Tropical Botany at The Kampong
The FIU International Center for Tropical Botany is a research and education center that offers community programming on preservation of tree canopies, improving pollination, combatting plant extinction and more. The center is surrounded by a living laboratory of native plants.
FIU is a Tree Campus USA
Florida International University is the first university in Florida to earn the Tree Campus USA designation from the Arbor Day Foundation for our preservation and management of trees on campus. As a proud member, we engage our students in service learning and reach beyond campus borders to connect with the community to foster healthy, urban forests.
Did you know?
FIU's International Center for Tropical Botany is adjacent to the Kampong — the historic home of famed plant explorer David Fairchild and a national tropical botanical garden operated in collaboration with FIU.
Visit us on our Modesto A. Maidique Campus
11200 SW 8th St.
Miami, FL 33199Visit us on our Biscayne Bay Campus
3000 NE 151st St.
North Miami, FL 33181