Dean of the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts, Howard University
Raquel Monroe
Raquel Monroe, Ph.D., was appointed as dean of the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts at Howard University in August 2025. In this role, she will oversee academic, performance, and research programming for visual arts and design, music, and theater arts. An award-winning academic and cultural leader, she joins Howard University from her most recent role as a full professor and associate dean of graduate education and academic affairs in the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Fine Arts.
Dr. Raquel Monroe is an interdisciplinary performance scholar, artist, administrator and mother whose research interests include Black social dance, queer black feminisms, popular culture and the efficacy of collaboration to create social change. Monroe’s scholarship appears in journals and anthologies on race, sexuality, dance and popular culture.
Her in-process monograph Black Girl Werk: Choreographies of Liberation by Black Femme Cultural Producers employs queer Black feminist choreographic praxis to theorize performances and acts of protest by Black femmes in the public sphere, on stage and screen. Monroe realizes her passion for collaboration as a member of Propelled Animals, an interdisciplinary arts collective who create site-responsive, multimedia live performances that interrogate, challenge and ultimately attempt to dismantle the systemic “isms” of oppression. The Propelled Animals have received support from the MAP Grant Fund, National Performance Network, Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation USAI Grant, the Walder Foundation and The Studio for Creative Inquiry’s Fund for Art at the Frontier at Carnegie Mellon. She also is an award-winning pedagogue and a founding board member of the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance (CADD).
She joined the College of Fine Arts from her role at Columbia College Chicago, where she served as the co-director of diversity, equity and inclusion. In her role, she developed policies and procedures for hiring diverse faculty, created and facilitated pedagogy workshops and offered programming grants and antiracism training for faculty and staff throughout the institution.
The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Arts and Design Alumni
The authors of this report, Dr. Rachel Skaggs, Dr. Jennifer L. Novak-Leonard and Dr. Jeff Barbee, provide insight into arts and design graduates whose work is — or before the pandemic was — in the arts, design, or creative realm by examining their working lives, economic lives, and the skills that they needed to attain or update during the first two years of the pandemic in the United States. This report was supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.
