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Dear Friends,
As I near my one-year anniversary as dean of the College of Fine Arts, I’ve had the pleasure of learning about the breadth and depth of research in our college. I’ve been especially impressed with the historical range of research, from the ancient Roman empire and pre-Columbian Mesoamerica to some of the pioneering work we see at the intersection of arts and technologies today.
The arts archive and embody traditions we continue to mine, uphold and reinvent, as well as the new forms that will express our imagination into the future. While we preserve and uphold our history and traditional repertoires, our faculty are also exploring new forms in transmedia and performance, advancing experimentation and innovation in music composition and developing new theatre and dance works. In doing so, they push both at the formal conventions of each medium represented in the college and expand the notion of creativity at the core of an arts education. We look to the past, as we constantly move forward.
We employ cutting-edge technologies to uncover new insights and animate ancient history. The use of LIDAR technologies has helped uncover whole new settlements obscured by thick jungle cover for centuries in Central America. We create 3-D models of excavated Roman villas buried by a volcano eruption in 79 AD. Our faculty conduct archival research for new insights that inform how we think about our disciplines and how to move our practices forward.
And our faculty and students are constantly exploring new ways to adapt new technologies to execute their creative visions. From designing new experiences for virtual and augmented reality to incorporating projection design into an opera set, our community is pushing the boundaries of what technology can do to create narratives.
Our college’s greatest strengths are our scale, size and interdisciplinarity, and I’ve been impressed by the dynamism of our college and its temporal span between the past, present and future. I’m excited to see what’s next as we engage with history and make history for our fields.
Sincerely,
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