Christopher ‘Kit’ Spicer named interim CFPA dean

Christopher “Kit” Spicer has been appointed to serve for a one-year term as interim dean of the College of Fine and Performing Arts at Western Washington University, Provost Catherine Riordan announced today.

Spicer will be the interim dean, effective Aug. 1, 2013. He succeeds Dan Guyette, who resigned as CFPA dean to become dean of the College of Fine Arts at Western Michigan University.

“Under Dean Guyette’s leadership, the CFPA has become an even more integral component of Western’s education and outreach efforts. The CFPA advisory board formed under his leadership is one of our strongest and most active. Dean Guyette had guided the college through a restructuring process that has yielded important programmatic foci and CFPA faculty have been actively engaged in serious examination of their own processes supporting quality,” Riordan said.

“The college is currently in a strong position, and through the appointment of Dr. Spicer, and the continuing leadership of Associate Dean Lesley Sommer, the very positive trajectory of the last few years will be continued,” Riordan said.

Plans are to initiate a national search for the next CFPA dean in the upcoming 2013-14 academic year.

“I’m pleased to join the College of Fine and Performing Arts at WWU. I’ve long admired Western for its unyielding commitment to student-centered education,” Spicer said. “I’m especially looking forward to continuing to support and build on-going collaborations within the college, across the university and with the broader community.”

Spicer has a doctorate in Organizational Communication from the University of Texas at Austin. From 2003 to 2011, he was dean of the College of Fine Arts & Communications at Towson University, in Towson, Md.; the college has 3,300 undergraduate and graduate students in six departments.

From 1995 to 2003 he was dean of the School of the Arts at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma. At Pacific Lutheran University, he also served as associate professor, professor and chair of the Department of Communication and Theatre. In 1999 he was a Fulbright Scholar at European University in Lisbon, Portugal.

Spicer, who now lives in Tacoma, has been published extensively in scholarly publications and has been actively involved in numerous civic, professional and community organizations. 

WWU's College of Fine and Performing Arts seeks to nurture a comprehensive understanding of the languages of Movement Art, Visual Art, Theatre Art and Music in order to create thinking artists and artistic thinkers who will shape culture in the 21st century. The college includes the departments of Art, Design, Theatre and Dance and the Western Gallery, Outdoor Sculpture Collection and Sanford-Hill Piano Series.