Dear Fine Arts Community,
I’m delighted to share that I’ve appointed Laura Gutiérrez, an associate professor in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies and former faculty member in the Department of Theatre and Dance, as our new Associate Dean for Diversity, Community Engagement and Public Practice. She will be stepping into this role Aug. 1.
As I shared earlier this fall, we’ll be reimagining this portfolio under this new name to focus on high visibility and high impact engagement initiatives with community partners to foster a culture of collaboration between our college and our immensely diverse local arts scene. We’ll be working this spring to hire a full-time program coordinator to support this important work.
Gutiérrez was recruited to UT Austin originally to join the Performance as Public Practice faculty in the Department of Theatre and Dance in 2013, before she transitioned to the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies. Along with her faculty appointment, Gutiérrez has also served as interim chair and associate chair of the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies. As interim chair of the department, Gutiérrez shepherded the department’s Ph.D. proposal through the complex approval process, and it was implemented in fall 2018, making it the first PhD Latino Studies program in Texas and the U.S. South. She’s also served as interim graduate studies advisor of both the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies and the Department of Theatre and Dance. She will be returning to the College of Fine Arts with an academic courtesy appointment in the Department of Theatre and Dance in the fall.
Gutiérrez’s areas of research are Latinx performance, visual culture, queer studies and feminisms. She is the author of Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y Cabareteras on the Transnational Stage and has published essays and book chapters on topics such as Latinx performance, border art, Mexican video art and Mexican political cabaret. Some recent writing has appeared in book chapter form in Decentering the Nation and The Cambridge History of Latina/o Literature. In fall 2022 she received a Getty Scholars Grant and is currently in residence at the Getty Research Center in Los Angeles, where she worked on her monograph Binding Intimacies in Contemporary Queer Latinx Performance and Visual Art.
Gutiérrez is on the board of The Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas, a week-long seminar that takes place every summer in Tepoztlán, Morelos, Mexico, and on the board of Project X Foundation in Los Angeles, which oversees the publication of X-Tra, the longest-running contemporary arts journal in the city. In Austin, Gutiérrez has been on the board of OUTsider Fest since 2016, an Austin-based transmedia non-profit that celebrates the bold originality and creative nonconformity of the LGBTQ+ communities through the showcases of its annual festival. She has been the education coordinator, as well as the curator of the Conference on the Couch and a performance curator.
Please join me in extending a warm welcome to Laura as she prepares to step into this new role in the fall.
Sincerely,
