Karin Broker
Visual & Dramatic Arts
Professor and Chair

Broker speak:

Our Mission: The Department of Visual & Dramatic Arts at Rice University allows
young artists to ground their work in informed perspective. We encourage our students
to bridge energetic and artistic pursuit with scholarly thought and interesting dialog.

Our department gives students the opportunity to focus their art education in one of three distinct tracks of study. You can major or double major in Studio, Theatre, or Film. All three tracks overlap in such a way as to give each student experience in other art practices such as, a film track artist is encouraged to take an acting class as well as a studio drawing class. We believe that this creates a more varied and interesting student with a more competitive approach for graduate education or practical application.

All three of our tracks of study begin with a basic and solid foundation. As students mature artistically, they are encouraged to experiment and broaden their expertise. In addition, we supplement course work with distinguished speakers, visiting artists, exhibitions, film series, and competitive residency programs as our competition for juniors for a spring semester of study at New York University's "Spring at NYU" program.

Many of our students marry their careers in art to other disciplines of study. Our department has a generous policy of developing the hidden talents of all our Rice students. We work hard to provide an active, artistic environment where individuals can pursue art interests while continuing other fields of scholarly study on the other side of campus. We stress the connections and importance of all fields of interest and feel that the artwork produced is clearly richer and more diverse because of collaborative engagement.

We are a diverse group of faculty who contribute significantly in the profession of art making on the local, national and international levels. Every semester we have three to four new guest artist/instructors from the nearby Museum of Fine Arts, Houston's Glassell School of Art. These MFAH Core Fellow participants are some of the most talented artists chosen from a competitive national and international pool of post-graduate artist/teachers.

Our teaching efforts are equally enhanced by the fact that we operate within a university that encourages interdisciplinary study and that we are centrally located within a large city with extraordinary visual and performing arts organizations and venues. Houston is a vibrant city that embraces the arts with a maverick gusto that may only be seen in Texas.

The arts in Houston serve as on of the primary educational tools for our extremely focused art students and may be tapped as a strong supplemental arena of art research, production, and studyÑproviding a broader, more liberal arts education.

Whichever approach is best for you, we remain strongly supportive, encouraging, and driven in each student's pursuit of creative excellence.