About Us

Excellence in the arts is both a process and an outcome.  It calls for integrity, fairness, honesty, and determination to forge ahead with what we discern as appropriate for the time and context in which we find ourselves.  It gives us the opportunity to showcase the three-part synergy - research, production and performance, and applied studies - that defines our approach to comprehensive arts education.  Excellence also defines our working environment: being excellent requires grounding in the foundations of our artistic traditions while simultaneously encouraging innovative practice in anticipation of the future.

The College of Fine Arts undertook a comprehensive review of how excellence might define our five-year plan for strategic improvement and program enhancement. More than 75 members from the College's faculty, students, staff, and community board members enthusiastically engaged in discussions from which a definition of excellence in the arts and a revised strategic plan emerged. This plan has been a helpful navigational tool as we chart our course towards our transformation to becoming a premier College of Fine Arts.  Each year we revise our three-year strategic goals and link them to our development and community support requests.

As creators, research scholars, and practitioners in the arts, we embrace creative and artistic intuition and connoisseurship as modes of our innovative scholarly and creative research.  Our studios, rehearsals, seminars, and classrooms are our laboratories - where we allow our work, and that of our students, to develop and flourish with all the risks and rewards that accompany the creative process.

We recognize that the power of the arts resides in giving voice to individual ideas and dreams; yet, we also aspire to cultivate the strength that comes from our collective wisdom and energy. By committing ourselves to an overall goal of making excellence our standard of practice and performance, we can nurture the development of the artist and scholar while also being mindful of our responsibility to be actively engaged with our communities.

Excellence also compels us to balance our multiple constituencies: students who pursue professional training in the arts; students who desire an arts education rooted in the liberal arts traditions; and students and our broader community who study and participate in the arts generally and who are our audiences and advocates. Excellence draws together our individual strengths into a confluence of aspirations that will propel us to the forefront of higher education in the arts.We are confident that our planning process and our goals to ensure excellence will allow us to flourish and to achieve distinction as a pre-eminent institution of artistic inquiry and discovery. The support of our alumni and friends will be critical to that success.Thank you for caring and investing in our vision.

Maurice J. Sevigny

Dean