Lucinda Bliss Joins CU Denver as the Dean of the College of Arts & Media

CU Denver’s College of Arts & Media (CAM) welcomed Dean Lucinda Bliss on July 1, 2024. Dean Bliss brings a dynamic vision for the future of arts and education and a wealth of experience from Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt), where she served as associate provost and dean of graduate, professional, and continuing education
As Provost Constancio Nakuma shared in his announcement to the university community, “Bliss will play a key role in championing CAM’s vision in the coming years—building on the outstanding talents and efforts of its faculty, staff, and students—to grow the college’s impact on the artistic and geographic communities we serve.”

A “Circuitous Path” to Becoming Dean

A leader in arts education, Bliss will be bringing experience as both an educator and artist to CAM. At MassArt, Bliss took pride in her work creating greater access to education, while navigating a shifting landscape in academia. She believes in working with faculty and staff to create a mission and vision for CAM aligned with CU Denver’s goal of becoming an equity-serving intuition. 

 “I’m a bit of a unicorn in my interests and well aligned with CAM in that regard,” said Bliss. “For over twenty years I have been a committed visual artist, teacher, and administrator; however, I played in garage bands for years, and though I’m not a serious musician, I still play piano and bass for fun. I love vinyl records and have a voracious appetite for music."

Bliss attended Skidmore College as an undergraduate to study theater, thinking she wanted to write and act, but quickly fell in love with art history and ended up focusing on art history and the visual arts. After college Bliss worked at the William Morris Agency, in the motion theater and theater department, while taking night classes at the Art Students League in New York. Bliss said "in a sense, CAM feels like a reunion with some of my early interests.”  

In what she refers to as a “circuitous path” to becoming dean, Bliss has witnessed the transformative power of art and education in her work in traditional and non-traditional educational settings, and she is committed to providing access to education to a broad and diverse body of students. Growing up with a single mother Alison Hawthorne Deming, who became a successful writer, she says she saw how a disciplined creative practice “brought sense of richness and meaning to one’s life, and how that commitment to practice could build over time into a profoundly rewarding career."

An Artist and Educator

In her artistic practice as a visual artist, Bliss draws on her multidisciplinary background and her interest in history and place. Her mixed media work frequently examines the play between power and inequity and has shown at venues including Stanley Whitman House Museum, Boston Center for the Arts, Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy, the Ogunquit Museum of Art, Whitney Art Works, Rose Contemporary, Bates College Museum of Art, and the Tucson Museum of Art, among others. 

As an avid and accomplished runner, she often incorporates research done through literal exploration of the landscape into her practice. Her strong connection to the land is one of the many personal, professional, and artistic reasons she was drawn to Colorado. 

In her brief time in her new environment, Bliss has explored high-altitude mountain trails and is acclimating to new surroundings. She is looking forward to the profound impact the landscape will have on her running and creative pursuits. Bliss is finding joyful curiosity in Colorado, exploring the arts and music scene in Denver, and discovering xeriscaping at her new home, which is of course fitting for a Colorado artist drawn to the physical realm. Bliss mentions meeting with faculty in her first few weeks and feeling “gratitude to have the opportunity to work with such remarkable artists and scholars and finding surprising connections between seemingly diverse departments and programs, from art history and the visual arts, to music, writing, recording, and media forensics.” 

At MassArt, Bliss led the Graduate Programs, which oversaw multiple disciplines: architecture, art education, design innovation, the dynamic media institute, film and video, fine arts, three-dimensional art, and photography. She also oversaw professional and continuing education, including certificate programs in digital media, communication design, industrial design, fashion design, furniture design, and more. Bliss holds a BA in Art History from Skidmore College and an MFA in Visual Art from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

A Commitment to Student Success

Bliss looks forward to becoming part of the CAM community and learning from students, faculty, staff, and CU Denver leadership. Her approach to success at CAM will emphasize the student experience. From building a culture of cross disciplinary collaboration across departments, bringing our vision to be equity-serving to all aspects our work, and actively working to build systems of financial and other supports for our students, we will work as a community—drawing upon the expertise of the storytellers, researchers, and makers in our community-to move into our shared mission and vision for the future. 

“One of the things about leadership that lights me up is bringing people together around a set of shared goals,” said Bliss. “CAM is poised to grow in some remarkably interesting ways, and I’m excited to collaborate with faculty and staff in that work. Conceptually, I’m interested in the spaces between things for their generative possibility. I think of art history and the way that it helps us to understand our human history— how we make meaning, how we see ourselves – and how essential that is to CAM. Perhaps that is the thread that links the various disciplines —the idea of meaning and how everything from our phones, to our forks, to our skateboards, to our album covers, to our playlists, to the art on our walls, to the buildings we live and work in— these are all created and imbued with meaning. At CAM, there is a focus on providing an education that leads to a career, and that is wonderfully accurate, but it also leads to a life sustained with meaning.”