Natalie Schuessler

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

We recently welcomed our Fine Arts Advisory Council for our annual fall meeting on campus. Our Advisory Council is a group of our most devoted supporters who come to advise on strategic positioning and advancement of the college and offer philanthropic support for our programs and students.

At this fall meeting, we had a running theme of welcoming new leadership, both within the college and within our Advisory Council. We took time to recognize Caroline Schupbach for her fearless leadership as chair of the Advisory Council for the past three years. A San Antonio resident, Caroline has been an incredible supporter as I transitioned into my role as dean of the College of Fine Arts. We passed the ceremonial baton to our new chair, Susanna Moldawer of Houston. Both Caroline and Susanna expressed their enthusiasm and support for our college’s commitment to maintaining a program that values both excellence and accessibility for new generations of students pursuing arts careers. I look forward to working closely with Susanna and our council as we continue to build on the success of the college.

We introduced the Fine Arts Advisory Council to new leadership within our college, including Peter Carpenter, the new chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance, and Susan Thomas, the new director of the Butler School of Music. Peter and Susan offered us inspiring descriptions of the communities of artists, scholars and educators they now lead in the college.

We also introduced some of our new leadership heading up our college’s community engagement efforts: Associate Dean of Graduate Education and Academic Affairs Raquel Monroe, Associate Dean for Community Engagement and Public Practice Laura Gutiérrez, Director of the Center for Creative Economies Sonia Montoya and Associate Professor Charles Carson. Our panel had a robust discussion around the work of the Center for Creative Economies to prepare our students to navigate their creative careers with the appropriate business and legal skills. We also discussed how we’re integrating into our college the concept of artistic citizenship, an arts-based research framework that combines art/artmaking, social responsibility, community engagement and ethics, all with an eye toward practice.

And, of course, we had the pleasure witnessing impressive performances from student musicians. Artem Kuznetsov, a graduate student in piano performance in the Butler School of Music, gave an incredible performance at our welcome reception the evening before our meeting, and six students from our jazz program performed under the direction of Associate Professor Diego Rivera at our meeting.

I’m so grateful to our Fine Arts Advisory Council and all the faculty, staff and students who participated in this fall’s meeting. Our new leadership brings amazing energy to our efforts to support and sustain our college’s mission and vision.

Sincerely,

Edith O’Donnell, a longtime friend to the College of Fine Arts and a member of the college’s Advisory Council, passed away this past week at the age of 94. Our thoughts and hearts go out to her family and friends.

The Dallas Morning News referred to Edith without exaggeration as the “Mount Rushmore of Dallas philanthropists.” On the UT campus, it’s no understatement to say that our college and most of our faculty and students benefit from her generosity every single day. Edith, along with her husband Peter, have truly been two of the great arts and education philanthropists of Texas.

A UT graduate, she joined the Fine Arts Advisory Council in 1990. We honored her with the E. William Doty Award—our college’s highest honor—in 1997.

Her generosity to our college extends across many disciplines, including the Chair in Latin American Art History and Criticism, the History of Music Chair and the Theatre for Youth Chair, faculty endowments that have allowed us to attract and retain distinguished artists, scholars and performers.

She also helped establish the Dallas Endowed Presidential Scholarship in Art, which has supported more than 50 students since it was created in 1994. And her Visiting Artists Chair and the Visiting Chair in the Fine and Performing Arts have allowed us to elevate the profile of our programs and to expose our students to an incredible, diverse array of visiting guest artists and their work.

We’re enormously grateful to Edith O’Donnell. I’ll miss her gentle, generous spirit greatly. But that spirit will live on in our college, in our faculty and in our students, every day for many, many years to come.

Excelsior!

Doug Dempster
Dean