Dear College of Fine Arts Faculty, Staff and Graduate Students,
I’m delighted to introduce Dr. Raquel Monroe, who will be joining our college as our new associate dean for graduate education and academic affairs. We conducted a competitive national search for this position, and we’re so glad to have Raquel join our team. She will step into this role July 16.
In her new role, Raquel’s portfolio will include graduate studies and the expansive research and creative practice work the college advances across our many disciplines.
As a scholar-practitioner, Raquel has led in some of the most exciting changes in the fields of dance and performance of the past decades. She has advanced curricular transformation in dance to be responsive to diverse archives and repertoires beyond the historically centered traditions of ballet and modern dance. She’s also participated in the creation and sustenance of professional development organizations devoted to advancing work on African and African Diasporic performance (including theatre, dance and music). As a performance practitioner, curator and scholar, she has pursued work that is responsive and impactful to the communities where it unravels. Her range of interdisciplinary experience will be incredibly valuable as we work to advance the places where our community meets and advances the arts through pedagogy, research and creative practice.
Raquel joins us from 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.
Raquel 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. She 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 is also an award-winning pedagogue and a founding board member of the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance.
We’re thrilled to welcome Raquel Monroe to the College of Fine Arts, and I hope you’ll join me in extending a warm welcome to her in this role.
Sincerely,
