As we head into a new academic year, I’m so excited to greet a slate of new faculty members and leaders, kick off new initiatives and build a strategic plan for the College of Fine Arts.
We’re welcoming impressive new leaders in our departments and schools, including Susan Thomas, the new director of the Butler School of Music, and Peter Carpenter, our new chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance. Both these leaders bring impressive scholarly and administrative experience to their roles, and I look forward to working with them as they build on the success of their respective programs.
We continue to build our leadership in the areas of arts economies and arts communities. Professor Laura Gutierrez has been appointed our new associate dean for community engagement and public practice, and Sonia Montoya joined the college last spring as the director of the Center for Creative Economies (previously known as the Center for Creative Entrepreneurship). I’m excited to see both of these new leaders develop their portfolios to more closely integrate our students and faculty members into local and regional arts communities and to develop new opportunities that set our students up for professional success in the creative economy.
As we work to build and expand our profile of research and creative activity, we are welcoming an incredible slate of scholars and artists to our faculty. We have hired five new tenured faculty members and four tenure-track faculty members, and another five career faculty members are joining our ranks. I’m particularly excited about our four new faculty members who were hired as part of our Expanding Approaches to American Arts initiative, as their research focuses on underrepresented and interdisciplinary areas of scholarship and creative practice.
You’ll learn more about each of these new administrators and faculty members in this issue.
Last fall, we held our college’s first Arts Summit, focused on Latinx arts, as we convened scholars and practitioners from across the country to talk about the state of Latinx art and how UT can best serve this community, especially with our designation as a Hispanic-Serving Institution. We are committed to continuing our conversations with the communities we engage with and serve, and to that end, we will be organizing future summits focused on Black arts, rural arts, arts and technology and more in the coming years.
We’re also deep into a strategic planning process for the College of Fine Arts, alongside the university’s own strategic plan, Change Starts Here. We’ve been hard at work during the summer, and we’ll continue consulting our stakeholders during the fall as the plan takes shape. I look forward to sharing more about our strategic goals in the spring.
In the pages of this issue, I hope you’ll enjoy the look back at some of the amazing research and creative activity that we saw during the past year. We have an exciting year ahead of us as we continue building on the incredible success of our faculty, students and alumni.
Sincerely,
Ramón H. Rivera-Servera
Dean, College of Fine Arts