Thinking, Creating, Performing
LMU College of Communication and Fine Arts
Bryant Keith Alexander, Ph.D., Dean
LMU College of Communication and Fine Arts
The Loyola Marymount University College of Communication and Fine Arts (LMU CFA) is a vibrant thinking, creating, and performing community committed to exploring creative and critical expression as an essential component of educating the whole person. LMU CFA provides our students with a humanistic liberal arts education that fosters a desire for knowledge, cultivates the skills for lifelong learning, and instills leadership and service to create a just world.
Our students and faculty are phenomenally productive in art-making, playwriting, music composition, and scholarly publication with a particular commitment to performance and production, creative and critical expression in the forms of art, theatre, debate, dance and in those highly encouraged spaces of collaboration, cooperation and community building. Through educational, professional and performance activities, LMU CFA is ideally situated to provide our students with dynamic educational experiences that bleed the borders between campus and community for personal and professional enrichment.
Performing and Fine Arts
Throughout the academic year, our programs offer more than 100 free or low-cost performances, events and exhibitions, all of which invite audiences to experience the use of performance and fine arts not only as an expression of craft, but as an embodied search for knowledge, a process of discernment, and a strategic tool that fosters a desire for critical exploration and adventure. In the coming years, the college plans to refurbish historic facilities and introduce new buildings in theatre, dance, music, as well as public lecture spaces.
Diverse Communities, Creative Engagement
LMU CFA offers opportunities for all our students and faculty to impact the lives of thousands of at-risk children, adults and families through diverse service initiatives, both as independent programs and integrated into academics. Our students and faculty are involved in service through mentorships, coursework, awareness campaigns, therapeutic programs, partnerships, fundraisers and international programs, such as:
- Young Choral Scholars Program
- ARTsmart
- St. Ignatian Dialogues and Jesuit Cup
- Dance as Social Action
- Design Entrepreneurship
- Summer Arts Workshop
- Stages of AIDS
Communication as Art, Art as Communication
In a college that comprises the diverse areas of communication studies as well as the performing and fine arts, we seek to empower every student to embrace their particular ability to make a difference in the world. This is facilitated through the critical, artistic and creative skills that we nurture and develop—skills based in an ethic of critical care, culture and community, and which fully embrace communication as art, and art as communication. Each concept presents a mechanism that serves as mirror to society, and offers strategies to reimagine the world in which we want to live.
Meet the Dean
Bryant Keith Alexander, Ph.D.
Bryant Keith Alexander, Ph.D. is dean of the LMU College of Communication and Fine Arts as well as a professor of Communication and Performance Studies.
He is an active scholar, lecturer and performer with publications in leading journals — along with major contributions in such volumes as the "Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies" (SAGE), "Handbook of Performance Studies" (SAGE), "Handbook of Qualitative Research" (SAGE, Third Edition/Fifth Edition), "Handbook of Communication and Instruction" (SAGE), "Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication" (Wiley-Blackwell), "Handbook of Autoethnography" (Left Coast), “The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication” (Oxford), and the forthcoming, “Handbook of Communication and Gender” (Routledge)”. He is the co-editor of "Performance Theories in Education: Power, Pedagogy and the Politics of Identity" (2005, Erlbaum), author of "Performing Black Masculinity: Race, Culture, and Queer Identity" (2006, Alta Mira), and "The Performative Sustainability of Race: Reflections on Black Culture and the Politics of Identity" (2012, Lang).
Before coming to LMU, Alexander held key administrative jobs at Cal State L.A., including associate dean, interim dean of the College of Arts and Letters, as well as acting chair of the Liberal Studies Department. Prior to joining the faculty at Cal State in 1998, Alexander taught at Texas A&M University, Minnesota State University Moorhead and Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
He earned his Ph.D. from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He holds bachelor's and master's degrees from what is now the University of Louisiana, Lafayette.
In his academic and administrative career, Alexander has promoted issues of race, culture and gender diversity; supported issues of equality and social justice; been committed to student-and faculty-engaged decision-making, as well as critical and democratic pedagogy; and supported interdisciplinary studies across departments and colleges.