The world in 2025 has been described as a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous one, and is increasingly globalised. Twenty-first century problems are often complex and entangled, and cannot be solved satisfactorily using single methods or approaches. In moving towards resilient futures in education, students cannot afford to think and act in isolation; it is imperative that they are able to build bridges to connect and respond to one another in complex societies to solve complex problems across disciplines. There is thus a need for twenty-first century educators to help students hone their interdisciplinary competence (Brassler & Dettmers, 2017) by redesigning curricula to foster learning across disciplines. Arts education may be peculiarly suited for fostering such twenty-first century competencies, as the arts are cosmic in their resonance (Braidotti, 2013), and have potential to help humans embody complex, simultaneous, non-linear causalities in the world. However, while there is value in fostering interdisciplinary learning which involve deeper integrations of disciplines, its facilitation in schools can have practical and pedagogical challenges, such as developing new syllabi for multiple disciplines (Flavian, 2024) and aligning timetables or schemes of work to allow for students to interact over a sustained period (de Greef et al., 2011). There is thus value in designing a model where students may perform their parts simultaneously, in parallel creative processes. To address these challenges, the design of cross-arts learning experiences could focus on a small number of structured encounters that could facilitate meaningful learning that promote changes in perspectives and ideas. Drawing on the notion of ekphrastic encounters across disciplines, I put forth a cross-arts model of ekphrastic encounters as a pedagogical approach that could empower curiosity and openness, and develop critical thinking. In this paper, I share the findings from a pilot phenomenological case study of a teacher-artist and teacher-musician’s experiences of a cross-arts model of ekphrastic encounters, and put forth suggestions for its adaptation for school contexts.