Leadership Bios

Michael Baker has worked in the entertainment industry and higher education for 20 years. Drawing on a diverse background in architecture, fine arts, and game development, Michael teaches courses in game design and technical art. Michael is co-director of the Planet Texas 2050 Escape Room experience – a cross departmental collaboration supported by the UT Office of the Vice President for Research and debuting at South by Southwest 2020. When he’s not training for a marathon, you’ll find this abiding member of the Atari generation gaming online and hanging out with his 19-year-old son.

Michael holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Imaging and Digital Art program at the University of Maryland where he studied computer graphics and interactive systems at the Imaging Research Center.

Andrée Bober has been a curator and arts administrator since 1991. A Texas native, she studied undergraduate art history and museology at The University of Texas at Austin and painting conservation in Vienna, Austria, and she earned a Master of Arts in arts administration from Columbia University, Teacher’s College in New York. Bober has led curatorial and administrative projects for institutions that include the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, and the Bard Graduate Center for the Study of Decorative Arts.

Prior to Landmarks, Bober served as deputy and interim director of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. She led the institution through the successful completion of its Zaha Hadid-designed facility, for which the architect won the Pritzker Architecture Prize. In addition to managing the administration and artistic program at the center, Bober curated several exhibitions, including Susan Unterberg: A Retrospective, for which she authored a substantial catalogue.

Bober is the founding director of Landmarks and author of The Collections: The University of Texas at Austin. She oversees all aspects of the university’s public art program while working closely with artists, consultants, and project stakeholders.

Bob joined TPA in January 2020 from the Fisher Center—a Frank Gehry-designed performing arts center on the campus of Bard College in New York—where he served as executive director. Since his appointment in 2012, the Fisher Center has earned a reputation as one of America’s most adventurous performing arts producers. His experience spans artistic genres and ranges from contemporary experimentation to rediscovering classic works, and is particularly recognized for forward-thinking collaborations and groundbreaking projects.

As executive director, Bob accomplished the rare feat of supporting extraordinary artistic success and expanding programs while engineering a fiscal turnaround. He eliminated a seven-figure annual deficit that had persisted since the organization’s founding in 2003, and achieved balanced budgets every year thereafter. Performances increased from 80 to more than 200 per year, while the yearly audience doubled in size and continues to grow.

An energetic fundraiser, Bob led the Fisher Center during the quiet phase of a $50 million campaign and doubled the membership of the Fisher Center’s Advisory Board. He worked with generous individuals and institutions to realize support for new initiatives such as a new works incubator called Live Arts Bard (LAB), residencies that bring leading artists to campus to work side-by-side with students and faculty, and a $5 student ticket fund.

Prior to his role at the Fisher Center, Bob served as producing director of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company. His 10-year role with the renowned choreographer culminated in the founding of New York Live Arts, an organization created through an innovative merger with Dance Theater Workshop.

The College of Fine Arts named choreographer, scholar and administrator Peter Carpenter as chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance in July 2023.

As an educator, Carpenter finds opportunities for interdisciplinary exchange across lines of artistry and scholarship. In his most recent leadership role as director of the School of Theatre and Dance at the University of Florida's College of the Arts, he oversaw significant curriculum revisions and developed a number of producing and educational relationships, including partnerships with New York Live Arts, Pinck Productions and Saudade Theatre.

Carpenter has been active as a choreographer since 1992, and his work for theatre includes engagements with Steppenwolf Arts Exchange, The Goodman, Strawdog, and National Pastime, among others. He choreographed and co-produced the 2012 short film Fanfare for Marching Band, directed by Danièle Wilmouth and featuring music by the band Mucca Pazza, which enjoyed international screenings.

Carpenter has received robust support for new commissions. He’s also received a Joseph Jefferson Citation, a Ruth Page Award and two nominations for the Alpert Award in Dance.

Doreen Lorenzo is a successful leader of global creative firms who advised Fortune 100 companies on design and innovation issues for decades. In March 2016, she was appointed Director of the Center for Integrated Design, and now serves as Assistant Dean for the School of Design and Creative Technologies. She is a co-founder of mobile video insights firm Vidlet, as well as a board member and advisor of several other startups, and a columnist for Fast Company Co.Design and Medium. A recognized thought leader on business and design issues, she speaks publicly about her signature leadership style and the power of empathy to drive business results.

Doreen is an ardent believer in the advantages of “soft skills” like empathy and humor in business. She speaks at industry conferences, at private events, and to the media about her experience using these often-overlooked skills to understand and motivate creative people. A driven and successful woman in a male-dominated industry, Doreen also speaks about women in leadership and coaches aspiring women leaders to help them find their own paths to success.

From 2013 to 2015 Doreen was president of Quirky, where she oversaw product development and operations for this fast-growing company. Prior to Quirky she worked at frog design for 16 years, including seven years as president. While president of frog she drove company strategy, oversaw worldwide operations and delivery, and led the iconic design firm to record growth.

As a thought leader on design and innovation, Doreen is a frequent resource to various business publications. She has been featured in ABC News, Bloomberg Radio, Fast Company, Fortune, The New York Times, and many other media. She served as a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies (2011-2012) and Emerging Multi Nationals (2013-2016).

Doreen earned a master’s degree in communication and media studies from Boston University and a bachelor’s degree in theater from the State University of New York, Stony Brook.

Professor Rather is the author of The American School: Artists and Status in the Late Colonial and Early National Era (New Haven and London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2016). The book was awarded the 2018 Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the New England Society Book Award for Art, and was short listed for the William MB Berger Prize for British Art History. During many years of research toward the book, Rather received grant support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Tyson Scholars program at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Winterthur Museum, the American Council of Learned Societies, Yale Center for British Art, Massachusetts Historical Society, and The University of Texas.

She has published articles and book reviews in a variety of journals, including American Art, Archives of American Art Journal, Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Arts Magazine, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Journal of the Early Republic, Metropolitan Museum Journal, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Source, Theatre Notebook, William and Mary Quarterly, and Winterthur Portfolio, as well as essays in exhibition catalogues and edited volumes. Rather holds a PhD from the University of Delaware and, at the outset of her scholarly career, engaged issues of modernism in early-twentieth-century American and European sculpture, culminating in Archaism, Modernism, and the Art of Paul Manship (1993).

Cuban and Latin American music scholar and administrator Susan Thomas was named Director of the Butler School of Music in July 2023. Thomas came to UT Austin from the University of Colorado Boulder, where she was the Joseph Negler Professor of Musicology and the director of the American Music Research Center (AMRC). As director of the AMRC, she worked to create opportunities for interdisciplinary exchange, community outreach and engagement and research into the full diversity of American music.

Thomas’s book, Cuban Zarzuela: Performing Race and Gender on Havana's Lyric Stage was awarded the Robert M. Stevenson Prize from the American Musicological Society and the Pauline Alderman Book Award from the International Alliance of Women in Music. Currently, she is completing her second book, The Musical Mangrove: The Transnationalization of Cuban Alternative Music, for Oxford University Press.

Thomas has received significant grant funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. While directing the AMRC, she also founded the journal, Americas: A Hemispheric Music Journal, for which she serves as editor-in-chief.