Dear Friends and Colleagues,

As I look back on this fall semester, I have been thinking about gratitude. I’m grateful for our students and so proud of the brilliant work I’ve seen them produce this semester. I want to share a few highlights of some of the work I’ve seen in the past few months.

I recently attended the Butler Opera Center’s showcase of Italian opera scenes alongside the premiere of Maria, a one-act opera by composition senior Josíah Garza. Garza, who grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, honors his grandmother and tells her story with such drive, empathy and beauty. (You can see a fantastic video interview with Garza about his process here.) This performance shows the kinds of stories that only a university like ours — by virtue of our scale and that we’re in Texas — can tell. Few opera programs are positioned to bring undergraduate composition to production, and our robust investment in opera allows us to showcase a bold repertoire alongside more contemporary work.

At the Visual Arts Center, I was captivated by the Queer Sublime exhibition, which was curated by students in the Center Space Project program. The exhibition was a visual exploration of the aesthetics of gothic literature and contemporary queer visual practice, and I was impressed with the range of works and our students’ deployment of abstraction to capture experience.

In Fall for Dance, the program selection offered was a stunning integration of body and media projection design. Our dancemakers are thinking holistically about the onstage experience for the public, and their work carries stories that are difficult, powerful and inspiring. I especially loved seeing students perform Associate Professor Gesel Mason’s Black Angel, a new staging of a work that Gesel choreographed and performed many years ago. It was a beautiful illustration of both how knowledge transfers through the body and a generous example of a teacher and maker opening opportunities for young performers to explore the same repertoire of gesture and movement that she cultivated in narrating her own experience.

I attended the final home football game of the season against Texas Tech, and the halftime show by the Longhorn Band showcased Texas musicians, including Willie Nelson, Selena and Beyonce. It was quite moving to see the way sport and art bring together the multiplicities of who we are as a community at UT and a ritual of belonging at a massive scale in the stadium.

And the Department of Arts and Entertainment Technologies held a grand opening event for their brand new Lab for Immersive Media this month. This new lab space is outfitted for motion capture and enables novel research and entertainment experiences in virtual and physical spaces.

Sincerely,