University of Texas at Austin
The Arts at the University of Texas at Austin
The University of Texas at Austin offers an expansive, interdisciplinary arts ecosystem—anchored by the College of Fine Arts and deeply integrated with Austin’s vibrant cultural life. Across visual art, music, theatre, dance, and digital media, students work in landmark facilities, curate exhibitions, perform in premier venues, and engage with professional and civic communities.
The College of Fine Arts houses four units: Art & Art History, Design & Creative Technologies, Butler School of Music, and Theatre & Dance, while delivering a spectrum of arts education enhanced by access to state-of-the-art facilities. Visual arts students study in the Art Building, which encompasses painting, sculpture, print, metal, woodshop, photography, transmedia, and digital fabrication labs. Research, making, and interdisciplinary innovation happen throughout the Doty Fine Arts Building, which hosts the Fine Arts Library and The Foundry. Here, students and faculty use 3D printers, laser cutters, VR tools, recording booths, and fabrication gear across disciplines, while the Visual Resource Collections, zines archive, and dance-era archives further support scholarly and creative inquiry across programs.
Performing arts at UT Austin happen at multiple premier venues managed by Texas Performing Arts (TPA). Students perform and intern across five theaters: Bass Concert Hall, McCullough Theatre, Bates Recital Hall, B. Iden Payne Theatre, and Oscar G. Brockett Theatre. Students pursuing music work in the Butler School of Music, housed in the Music & Recital Hall (MRH), featuring rehearsal studios, practice rooms, ensemble halls, and the home of the Longhorn Band. Signature ensembles perform in Bates Recital Hall, while recording is supported in digital studios. Theatre & dance students train in Winship Building’s Payne and Brockett Theatres as well as the Lab Theatre, immersive black-box spaces for student-generated production. Design, scenic, and costume shops support experiential learning in technical production, choreography, and performance collaborations. UT’s Office of Community Engagement & Public Practice sponsors seed grants for creative citizenship, internships via the CoFA Arts Administration Fellowship, and collaborative exhibitions and performances that extend partnerships across Austin’s arts ecosystem, including Fusebox, local museums, and performing arts groups.
The university’s creative infrastructure and civic partnerships make it an ideal place for collaborative innovation in visual, performance, digital, and public arts.
a2ru Campus Contacts
Dr. Raquel Monroe is an interdisciplinary performance scholar, artist, administrator and mother whose research interests include Black social dance, queer black feminisms, popular culture and the efficacy of collaboration to create social change. Monroe’s scholarship appears in journals and anthologies on race, sexuality, dance and popular culture.
Her in-process monograph Black Girl Werk: Choreographies of Liberation by Black Femme Cultural Producers employs queer Black feminist choreographic praxis to theorize performances and acts of protest by Black femmes in the public sphere, on stage and screen. Monroe realizes her passion for collaboration as a member of Propelled Animals, an interdisciplinary arts collective who create site-responsive, multimedia live performances that interrogate, challenge and ultimately attempt to dismantle the systemic “isms” of oppression. The Propelled Animals have received support from the MAP Grant Fund, National Performance Network, Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation USAI Grant, the Walder Foundation and The Studio for Creative Inquiry’s Fund for Art at the Frontier at Carnegie Mellon. She also is an award-winning pedagogue and a founding board member of the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance (CADD).
She joins the College of Fine Arts from her most recent role at Columbia College Chicago, where she served as the co-director of diversity, equity and inclusion. In her role, she developed policies and procedures for hiring diverse faculty, created and facilitated pedagogy workshops and offered programming grants and antiracism training for faculty and staff throughout the institution.
Katie Dawson uses the arts to increase equity and access in educational contexts. She is an associate professor at The University of Texas in Austin where she co-heads the M.F.A. in Drama and Theatre for Youth and Communities / UTeach Theatre program. Dawson received the Distinguished Book Award (for The Reflexive Teaching Artist: Collective Wisdom from the Drama/Theatre Field), the Creative Drama Award and the Winifred Ward Scholar Award from the American Alliance of Theatre and Education. Her second book Drama-Based Pedagogy: Activating Learning Across the Curriculum was published in 2018. Dawson is a Provost’s Teaching Fellow at UT where she received the 2015 College of Fine Arts Distinguished Teaching Award, the 2018 College of Fine Arts Distinguished Research Award and the 2013 Regents Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award. Dawson is an internationally recognized consultant in creative learning and teaching artist practice. She publishes, speaks and facilitates workshops locally and globally, including ongoing partnerships in Australia, Asia and Eastern Europe with university and government partners. Dawson recently completed a two-year fractional appointment at the University of South Australia in pedagogical innovation.
Prior to academia, Dawson worked as teacher, museum theatre educator, youth theatre director and actor.