The world in 2045 will be a different place. Although we cannot predict the future, we can shape it. Futures studies have developed methodologies to create futures images and scenarios. The potential for creativity and imagination at art schools, together with the urge for innovation in society at large brought together key players from Higher Arts Education and business in a Knowledge Alliance FAST 45 – Futures Art School Trends 2045. They are geared up to imagine a desirable future in which the participation, education and research in the arts play an integral part in a world that will have been radically reshaped by the 4th Industrial Revolution, globalisation and climate change. FAST45 collects knowledge, creates and tests methods and broadly implements them in Art School Futures Labs in which educators, researchers and employers will co-create futures scenarios and operationalise them in policy papers, long term collaborations and tools that will empower institutions and enterprises to not only better anticipate an unknown future, but actively shape it.By working across sectoral boundaries and by envisioning futures scenarios for 2045, FAST45 will (a) explore and inventory already existing research that substantiate ideas of possible, probable, or preferable futures for higher art education and the employment of artists, (b) organise Art School Futures Labs that enhance futures thinking and imagining alternative futures inside (students, lecturers, administrative staff and heads of departments) and outside (external public and private partners) institutes, (c) deliver four futures scenarios that highlight the discontinuities from the present and reveal the potential choices and their potential consequences that IHAE need to prepare for their longer-term future planning and decision-making, and (d) organise a general discussion / debate on possible policy and decision actions that informs and facilitates transformative leadership for strategic steps forward.