SUU arts administration program reaches 100 graduates
By Ashley H Pollock
The College of Performing and Visual Arts at Southern Utah University has reached two milestones this year. It is celebrating its 20th anniversary as an individual college and the arts administration program reached 100 graduates August 2018.
SUU offers a resident master of fine arts degree, an online master of arts degree, and an undergraduate minor in arts administration. Each program is designed to blend a love of the arts with the professional business skills necessary to promote, maintain, enhance, and fund arts organizations.
Kirsten Darrington, director of the Salt Lake County Zoo, Arts and Parks Program, graduated from SUU with a master’s degree in arts administration in 2011.
“During my time in the program, I was able to expand my network of people and organizations through different projects and assistantships,” Darrington said. “This made a world of difference when I graduated and was looking for jobs.”
Bretleigh Sandorf, manager of Institutional Giving at the National Dance Institute in New York, graduated from SUU with a master’s degree in arts administration in 2016.
“With constant online discussions, papers, etc., the program at SUU helped me to hone my abilities as a writer, and I continue to draw upon what I learned,” Sandorf said. “The most valuable thing I gained during my degree was how to think critically and look at a situation on many different levels.”
The arts administration program develops graduates who balance administrative systems with the creative process in an effort to ensure the artistic integrity and economic sustainability of arts organizations. With goals of advocacy, experiential learning, development of well rounded professionals, and providing a personalized and interdisciplinary education, graduates from this program hold administrative positions in national and international organizations.
Leslie Forrester, executive director of the Springfield Regional Arts Council of Missouri, graduated from SUU in 2011 with a master’s degree in arts administration.
“It is hard to name any one single thing that was most valuable,” Forrester said. “Learning from Bill Byrnes, the man who literally wrote the book on arts administration, is still something I reference in my day-to-day work. I am wildly grateful for the skills I gathered, the people I met, and the experiences I had during my time with the arts administration program at SUU.”
The hundredth graduate, Brian M. Kendall, works with the City of Las Vegas Office of Cultural Affairs as the cultural supervisor. He earned a master’s degree from SUU in August 2018.
“In the arts field, we are always faced with the opportunity to share and even sometimes defend our story,” Kendall said. “In order to do this, we must first know the story we are trying to tell. This was a universal and reoccurring theme in all my courses. In order to attract audiences, funders, board members, grantors, and political support, we must know what we stand for and how our work fits into the community. Even in the accounting class I learned that knowing the financial story of the organization provides powerful data needed to create the most accurate picture of the organization. I appreciated how every class focused on this as a common goal.”
For more information about admission into the arts administration program at SUU, please visit suu.edu/pva/aa/admission.html.
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