Dear Friends and Colleagues,
I hope everyone had some time to rest and recharge over the winter break. Despite the frigid temperatures in Austin last week, we are excited to return to classes for the spring semester. We have many great milestones and programs in store for our community.
We are in the final process of editing our college's strategic plan, and this week we've hosted town halls with our faculty, staff and students to share the four pillars of the plan: Research and Creative Practice, Education, Community Engagement and Organizational Culture. We’re grateful to our community for their participation in listening sessions last spring, which helped us shape our goals. We are on track to complete our final draft of the strategic plan later this spring.
We’re also excited about some upcoming and excellent academic programming. I wanted to share a few examples below to highlight some of the exciting scholars and visiting artists who will engage with our students and community this spring.
- The Department of Theatre and Dance is hosting choreographer Claudia Lavista, a Fulbright Robles Fellow from Mexico. During her visit, Claudia will be visiting classes and setting new choreography on our Dance students.
- In conjunction with the exhibition If we are here…, curated by Art History Ph.D. candidate and curatorial fellow Nicole Smythe-Johnson, the Visual Arts Center is hosting Las Nietas de Nonó as their spring artists-in-residence. The Puerto Rican sisters “evoke ancestral memory through personal archives” in their creative process, while incorporating performance, found objects, organic materials, ecology, fiction, video and installation.
- The Center for Latin American Visual Studies (CLAVIS) is hosting two excellent events: a lecture by María Elena Ortiz, curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, as well the Latin American and Latinx Art and Visual Culture Dissertation Workshop at the Latin American and Latinx Art and Visual Culture Dissertation Workshop Forum.
- Artist, designer and educator Debbie Millman is a featured speaker this spring with the School of Design and Creative Technologies. Host of the popular podcast Design Matters, Millman co-founded the Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
- In the Butler School of Music, the Music Theory division welcomes multiple scholars who are doing exciting work that engages the new directions of the field. Assistant Professor Paula Harper of the University of Chicago will give a guest lecture in Assistant Professor Chelsea Burns’ Popular Music Studies graduate seminar on social media and virality and how it shapes music-making today. Professor Jocelyn Neal of the University of North Carolina will also visit the seminar later in the spring to share her research about country music and identity.
We have a busy spring ahead of us, and we’re excited about what’s ahead for the College of Fine Arts as we plan for our future.
Sincerely,
