The College of Fine Arts welcomed 13 new professional faculty members for 2023-24.
Alexandra Bassett
Assistant Professor of Instruction, Department of Theatre and Dance
Bassett is a company member and managing director of Austin-based theatre collective Rude Mechs and serves as associate producing artistic director of the UTNT (UT New Theatre). She previously held an adjunct faculty position in the Department of Theatre and Dance. She holds an M.F.A. from Columbia University.
Rosemary Candelario
Associate Professor, Department of Theatre and Dance
Candelario writes about and makes dances engaged with Asian and Asian American dance, butoh, ecology and site-related performance. She was awarded the 2018 Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research for her book Flowers Cracking Concrete: Eiko & Koma’s Asian/American Choreographies (Wesleyan University Press 2016) and received the 2022 Mid-Career Award from the Dance Studies Association. Recent choreographic premieres include aqueous (site version, 2021), aqueous (stage version 2019) and 100 Ways to Kiss the Trees (2018). Candelario is the Dance Studies Association vice president for publications and research and holds a Ph.D. in culture and performance from the University of California Los Angeles.
Ondine Chavoya
Professor, Department of Art and Art History
Chavoya is an art historian with a focus on Chicanx avant-garde art and performance, and he is a leading figure in the field of Latinx art history and visual culture. Chavoya is the author of numerous publications on Chicanx art, including experimental video and performance. His award-winning curatorial projects include Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972–1987, the first museum retrospective to present the wide-ranging work of the performance and conceptual art group Asco with Rita Gonzalez, and Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. He joins the college from Williams College.
Hon Ki Cheung
Assistant Professor, Butler School of Music
Cheung’s research interests explore the relationship between concert programming and diversity discourse in musical institutions in the United States, as well as music by Chinese composers from the 20th and 21st centuries. Cheung focuses on how modern Chinese and Western societies influence pedagogy, the music-making process, and musical expressions in Chinese instrumental music. Cheung received a Ph.D. in Music with a minor in Sociology from the University of Minnesota in 2022.
Kyle Evans
Assistant Professor of Practice, Department of Arts and Entertainment Technologies
Evans is a new media artist, sound designer, educator and performer. Focusing on the intersection of art and technology, he explores concepts of hacking, technological failure and digital media artifacts. Evans previously taught in the department as an adjunct faculty member. He holds an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Lily Guerrero
Assistant Professor, Butler School of Music
The daughter of Mexican and Cuban immigrants, Guerrero studies the intersection of music and social justice in the United States. She received fellowship funding from the Society for American Music for her research on advocating for Latinx voices in classical music. She holds an M.M. in Opera Performance from Wichita State University and a D.M. in Voice Performance and a Certificate in Diversity and Inclusion from Florida State University.
Caleb Hudson
Associate Professor, Butler School of Music
Trumpet musician Hudson has been a member of the Canadian Brass, one of the premier brass ensembles in the world, for 10 years. He enjoys writing and arranging music and has had many works performed, published and recorded by Canadian Brass. Hudson received Bachelor and Master of Music degrees from The Juilliard School.
Sydney Parks
Assistant Professor of Practice, Department of Design
Parks is an artist and interactive designer interested in using technology to elicit haptic experiences that create tension between the human body and the virtual world. Parks’ work has been included in institutions such as Blaffer Art Museum, Houston; Lawndale Art Center, Houston; and Dallas Metro Arts Contemporary, Dallas. Her work has been published in HCE Review and R2: The Rice Review.
Alexandre Pépin
Assistant Professor of Practice, Department of Art and Art History
Pépin is a French-Canadian visual artist who draws from the legacy of Byzantine and early Renaissance frescoes, Post-Impressionism, Tonalism, the Viennese Secession and Pattern and Decoration to portray moments of queer intimacy and spiritual contemplation. He has received grants from the Quebec Arts and Letters Council (2017) and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation (2019). He has held residencies at the Vermont Studio Center (2017) and the Ox-Bow School of Arts (fellowship, 2021), and he has had solo exhibitions at Arsenal Contemporary Art and the Bradley Ertaskiran gallery in Montreal.
Hannah Spector
Assistant Professor of Practice, Department of Art and Art History
Spector is an interdisciplinary visual artist and poet who thinks of language as a solid object — a concrete and spatial expression that can overturn limiting perceptions of the everyday. Spector has exhibited work at Artpace, the San Antonio Museum of Art, UT’s Visual Arts Center, and Transformer Gallery and Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in the Washington, D.C., area. She has completed residencies for Sirens Arts Center, MASS Gallery and Pyramid Atlantic.
Ebonee Thomas
Assistant Professor, Butler School of Music
Thomas is the second flute and piccolo for The Dallas Opera and has previously served as principal flute for the Knoxville Symphony, principal flute for the Florida Grand Opera, and second flute of the Houston Symphony. She holds a Master of Music from the New England Conservatory of Music.
Enzo Vasquez Toral
Assistant Professor, Department of Theatre and Dance
Vasquez Toral is a Peruvian performer, scholar and educator whose expertise lies at the intersection of theatre and performance studies, queer and trans studies and Indigenous studies in Latinx America. His first book project, tentatively titled Folkloric Queens: Devotion, Queerness, and Performance in the Andes, investigates how queer and trans theatre, dance and drag artists have rethought normative notions of Andean folklore through performance in the 21st century.
Will Wilson
Associate Professor, Department of Art and Art History
Wilson’s art projects center around the continuation and transformation of customary Indigenous cultural practice. He is a Diné photographer and trans-customary artist who spent his formative years living in the Navajo Nation. Wilson received an M.F.A. from the University of New Mexico and a B.A. in Studio Art and Art History from Oberlin College. In 2010 he was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for Sculpture, in 2016 the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant for Photography and in 2021 the Native Arts and Culture Foundation SHIFT Fellowship. Wilson has taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Oberlin College and the University of Arizona. In 2017, Wilson received the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. In 2020, Wilson was Doran Artist in Residence at the Yale University Art Gallery, and in 2022 he co-curated Speaking with Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography, a nationally touring exhibition. Most recently, Wilson served as program head of the photography program at Santa Fe Community College.