Dear Friends and Colleagues,

In the past few months, our faculty and students have been recognized with some fabulous awards and accolades, and I wanted to take this opportunity to celebrate these achievements.

Theatre Associate Professor Paul Bonin-Rodriguez received UT System’s Regents Outstanding Teaching Award, one of only two UT Austin faculty members to be recognized across the entire UT System. Paul also received the College of Fine Arts Outstanding Teaching Award this year.

Art History Professor C. Ondine Chavoya was recently announced as part of 2023-24 MoMA Scholars in Residence cohort, and he is on leave now to pursue this opportunity. Art and Art History’s Social Practice Artist-in-Residence Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles was recently awarded the 2023 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship.

Associate Professor of Practice Michael Baker, chair of the Department of Arts and Entertainment Technologies, received a Creating Connections grant from UT’s Applied Research Laboratory for a project that explores methods for capturing environments and human motion to create a "digital twin" of the space and experience. In the long term, the project supports existing Competency-Based Experiential Learning and Synthetic Training Environment programs managed by the lab.

Design Professor Michael Ray Charles was named a member of the Provost’s 2023 Inaugural Member of the Aspiring Leaders Academy.

On the student side, two Fine Arts students recently received the 2023 Roy Crane Award: Performance as Public Practice graduate student Yunina Barbour-Payne and Butler School of music senior Brandon Foskett. Barbour-Payne also recently received First Prize in the S. Randolph Edmonds Young Scholars Competition for her research.

And finally, Theatre and Dance graduate students Mateo Hernandez, Allen Porterie and Deen Rawlins-Harris were selected as Point Foundation BIPOC scholars. They received financial and community support for their studies during the 2023-2024 academic year. The foundation is the largest scholarship-granting nonprofit focused on supporting LGBTQ students' academic success.