Dave Beck, director of UW-Stout’s School of Art and Design, has been recognized by the National Council of Arts Administrators.
Beck is one of six people who received the 2017-18 Emerging Arts Administrator Fellowship. They were honored at an NCAA conference held recently in Tucson, Ariz.
The fellowship includes working with a mentor before and during the conference. Beck’s mentor is Greg Watts, dean of the College of Visual Art and Design at the University of North Texas.
Beck, an associate professor and an associate dean in the College of Arts, Communications, Humanities and Social Sciences, is the founding director of UW-Stout’s program in game design and develop-art, Bachelor of Fine Arts. The program is nationally ranked, and student projects have taken two first places nationally in the past five years.
“It was an honor to be recognized as a fellow this year at the NCAA meeting in Arizona. This organization is a great community of arts administrators in higher education, and I was able to come away from the conference with a wonderful collection of new ideas, approaches and experiences revolving around leadership and administration in the arts,” Beck said.
“Additionally, the established network of colleagues and institutions from across the country will help UW-Stout’s School of Art and Design to become both more connected and competitive on a national scale.”
Other arts administrators who won this year’s fellowship are from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Cal State-Fullerton, Memphis College of Art, SUNY-New Paltz and University of Missouri-St. Louis.
Beck has a bachelor’s degree from St. Olaf (Minn.) College and a Master of Fine Arts from UW-Madison. His digital art and game design work has been featured in the New York Times, Sculpture Magazine, National Geographic and the journal Science, among others. He has had fellowships with the National Park Service, Science Museum of Minnesota and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.
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Photos
Top: Dave Beck works with game design and development students.
Bottom: Dave Beck
