Appointment of Associate Vice President Isabel Nazario

September 23, 2004

Members of the Rutgers Faculty and Staff:

I am enormously pleased to announce that Isabel Nazario, who has served as founding director of the Rutgers Center for Latino Arts and Culture since 1992, and as executive director of the Office for Intercultural Initiatives since 2002, has been appointed to the newly created position of Associate Vice President for Academic and Public Partnerships in the Arts and Humanities.

In that position, which reports directly to Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Philip Furmanski, Isabel will be responsible for working with faculty, staff, and students to develop and support academic co-curricular programs and collaborative research projects that lead to innovative public partnerships in the arts and humanities. Isabel will be building upon the good work she has already done with the Bildner Faculty Fellows Diversity Initiative and Transcultural New Jersey, a statewide arts and education initiative that promotes intercultural understanding through works produced by artists of color. Transcultural New Jersey, which involves twenty-two museums, libraries, art galleries, and schools throughout the state, is the subject of a documentary to be aired by New Jersey Network (NJN) in November as part of their State of the Arts series.

Isabel's professional background is well suited to her new responsibilities. Before coming to Rutgers in 1992 she held positions at the New York State Council on the Arts, Queens College, and Hunter College. At Queens College she developed the first courses on Latin American and Caribbean art history for the Art History and Puerto Rican Studies Departments, courses she subsequently taught at Hunter College. At Rutgers, she has taught a course on Latin American Art History through the Latin American Studies Program, and has co-created and co-taught a new course in the Visual Arts Department of the Mason Gross School of the Arts entitled "The Response of the Creative Mind to Gender, Race, Class and Identity," funded through a Rutgers Dialogues grant.

Over the course of her career at Rutgers, Isabel has raised support for exhibitions, public programs, and student scholarships from such sources as the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Johnson & Johnson, JP Morgan Chase, New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Merrill Lynch, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Hitachi, America Limited, and Rutgers University Hispanic/Latino Alumni. In 1997 she was one of seven Hispanic women in the nation to be awarded Hispanic Magazine's Women's Health and Science Award for developing an innovative arts and health education program for black and Latino youth. In 2002, she was recognized as a national leader for advancing the Hispanic arts by El Diario La Prensa, a daily newspaper for Hispanics in the United States.

I am delighted that Isabel had agreed to take on these new, university-wide responsibilities, which will serve not only our undergraduate and graduate students and faculty but also the broader community as well in promoting arts and humanities programs across all our campuses. Please join me in congratulating her on her new position.

Richard L. McCormick
President
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey