Dr. Raquel Monroe has been appointed as the new associate dean of graduate education and academic affairs in the UT College of Fine Arts, effective July 16. In her role, Monroe’s portfolio will focus on graduate studies and research and creative practice.
“I am delighted to welcome such a brilliant arts leader as Dr. Monroe into our community” said Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, dean of the College of Fine Arts. “Her interdisciplinary work is driven by a belief in the impact the arts have in our communities, and her wide-ranging experience as educator, scholar, artist and administrator committed to expanding access and opportunity in our field to all aligns perfectly with our direction as a College.”
She joins the college from her most recent role at Columbia College Chicago, where she served as the co-director of diversity, equity and inclusion. In her role, she developed policies and procedures for hiring diverse faculty, created and facilitated pedagogy workshops and offered programming grants and antiracism training for faculty and staff throughout the institution.
Monroe is an interdisciplinary performance scholar, artist, administrator and mother whose research interests include Black social dance, queer black feminisms, popular culture, and the efficacy of collaboration to create social change. Monroe’s scholarship appears in journals and anthologies on race, sexuality, dance and popular culture.
Her in-process monograph Black Girl Werk: Choreographies of Liberation by Black Femme Cultural Producers employs queer Black feminist choreographic praxis to theorize performances and acts of protest by Black femmes in the public sphere, on stage and screen. Monroe realizes her passion for collaboration as a member of Propelled Animals, an interdisciplinary arts collective who create site-responsive, multimedia live performances that interrogate, challenge and ultimately attempt to dismantle the systemic "isms" of oppression. The Propelled Animals have received support from the MAP Grant Fund, National Performance Network, Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation USAI Grant, the Walder Foundation, and The Studio for Creative Inquiry’s Fund for Art at the Frontier at Carnegie Mellon. She also is an award-winning pedagogue and a founding board member of the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance (CADD).