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.

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.

Professor Karol Murlak is a designer, researcher and educator specializing in design for research and science. His practice centers around creation and application of materials. Most recently, Murlak was a professor at Pratt Institute, New York, and he served as an associate professor at SWPS University, Warsaw, while managing his independent creative consultancy. Murlak has worked with institutions and companies in Europe and America, including Martinelli Luce, the Museum of Food and Drink and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. He has designed over 50 projects, creating innovative materials, products, furniture, exhibitions and public installations. His work ranges in scale and complexity — from patented technology of expanding wood and devices bringing relief for patients with spine and foot conditions to musical installations showcased in the world's busiest locations. Interdisciplinary research teams that he co-led have received multimillion-dollar research and development grants from the National Science Foundation and the European Research Council. He also holds a doctoral degree in Design and a master’s degree in Interior Architecture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Poland.

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.