News

August 25, 2021

New Academic Year Brings Transitions to the Lewis Center for the Arts

As we transition back to on-campus teaching, learning, and working for fall 2021, the Lewis Center for the Arts announces several personnel changes for the start of a new academic year.

Former Lewis Center Chair and University Lecturer in Theater Michael Cadden returns as Acting Chair for 2021-22, a position he previously held from 2012-2019. In addition to his duties as Chair, Cadden will continue to teach courses for the Program in Theater and the English Department at Princeton.

For the past two years Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and Professor of Creative Writing Tracy K. Smith held the position of Chair. In June she accepted a position at Harvard University, where she begins this fall as Professor of English and of African and African American Studies and as the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Smith joined the creative writing faculty at Princeton in 2005 and was appointed director of the program in 2015. While on faculty, Smith also served two consecutive terms as U.S. Poet Laureate from 2017-2019.

In the Program in Visual Arts, also known on campus simply as VIS, photographer and Professor of Visual Arts Jeff Whetstone will serve as the new Director of Visual Arts. Before coming to Princeton, he served as professor at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since 2001. Whetstone’s appointment as director commenced July 1st.

Whetstone’s predecessor, Martha Friedman, led the VIS program since 2017 and will return to teaching this fall full-time as Senior Lecturer. Friedman has been a member of the visual arts faculty since 2009, became a full-time lecturer in 2011, and was appointed Senior Lecturer in 2017.

 

Press Contact

Steve Runk
Director of Communications
609-258-5262
srunk@princeton.edu