Dr. Lorenzo Candelaria doesn’t live or work where he did 12 years ago, but the former Diverse Emerging Scholar has remained passionate about arts education and its potential to reach and inspire underrepresented students.
When Candelaria was part of the Emerging Scholars class of 2007, he was an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2008, he was awarded the prestigious Robert M. Stevenson Prize for outstanding scholarship on the music of Spain and Mexico.
Candelaria earned tenure at UT Austin and eventually joined the faculty at the UT campus in El Paso, where he was born. He later was appointed associate provost at the nationally recognized Hispanic Serving Institution, where he worked to position the arts in cross-disciplinary environments campus-wide.
Now, as professor of music and dean of the School of the Arts at Purchase College in the State University of New York system, Candelaria is continuing his mission as an advocate for the arts “as a means of effecting social mobility, of building inclusive communities and of inspiring our better selves,” he says.
“The opportunity was too good to pass up,” says Candelaria, pointing to Purchase’s internationally acclaimed conservatories and the access provided to the first-generation students and other underrepresented groups he’s committed to reaching and serving.
“I saw it as an opportunity to create a model for public education,” adds Candelaria, a first-generation college student who won a Fulbright Fellowship and earned a Ph.D. in musicology from Yale University. “I’m very happy. I’m doing the things I’ve been wanting to do since entering the professoriate. And I’m doing them at a place uniquely set up for the type of work I do. Purchase can create a compelling model to transform public arts education in America.”
Since arriving there last summer, Candelaria, 47, has made arts advocacy his school’s cause. His teaching, scholarship and community engagement seek to shape and drive “a national conversation on the central role of the arts in society” with “humanities-infused public programming” playing a vital role, he says.
