Purchase College names new dean for School of the Arts

Purchase College has named Lorenzo Candelaria as dean of its School of the Arts.

The SUNY school said that Candelaria, who is associate provost and a professor of music history at the University of Texas at El Paso, will start the new role in July 2017.

Candelaria will replace Ravi Rajan, who left Purchase at the end of the 2016-17 academic year to become president of the California Institute of the Arts.

In its announcement, the school described Candelaria as a noted scholar and arts administrator, who will bring “decades of experience in arts advocacy and arts education to Purchase.”

Candelaria will oversee Purchase’s conservatories of dance, music and theater arts, as well as the School of Art+Design and arts management programs.

Candelaria received his undergraduate education at the Cleveland Institute of Music and Oberlin Conservatory, and his Ph.D. from Yale University. Before arriving at the El Paso college in 2013, he served for 12 years on the musicology faculty of the University of Texas at Austin. In 2006, he was a distinguished faculty fellow in ethnomusicology at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.

Purchase College Provost Barry Pearson said Candelaria “will continue to broaden the relationship to the arts across campus and extend it to communities beyond the college, while finding ways to bring greater national and international attention to Purchase College”™s School of the Arts.”