President,
Columbia College Chicago
2013 - present
Biography from Dr. Kim president announcement website.
A native Chicagoan born and raised in Hyde Park, Dr. Kwang-Wu Kim is an outspoken advocate for the arts and a proponent of the need to expand the role of creative practice in society and to rethink the way that artists are educated. He assumed the role of dean of the Herberger College of the Arts at Arizona State University in August 2006; in May 2009 he was named dean and director of the newly created Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts which comprises the schools of Art; Arts, Media and Engineering; Dance; Design; Music; and Theatre and Film as well as the ASU Art Museum. In this role, he oversees a faculty and staff of 500, serving almost 5,000 students.
Dr. Kim holds a doctor of musical arts degree and an artist diploma from the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University where he was a student of pianist Leon Fleisher and where he served for eight years as Fleisher's teaching associate. He received his bachelor's degree in philosophy, magna cum laude, from Yale University. Prior to his arrival in Arizona, Dr. Kim served as president of the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Massachusetts and as artistic and administrative director of El Paso Pro-Musica and co-founder of the El Paso Chamber Music Festival. He is a Professor of Music at Arizona State University and has held teaching positions at the Longy School of Music, the University of Texas at El Paso, the Peabody Institute, and Dickinson College.
A guest speaker at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, Dr. Kim has been an invited panelist for the National Association of Schools of Music and a juror at the New England Conservatory, the Boston Conservatory, and the Boston Arts Academy. Because of his belief that collaboration between artists, scientists, and engineers will become increasingly necessary in order to create the rich knowledge base needed to solve our world’s complex problems, he has recently taken a leadership role in advancing a national agenda for the Arts in our universities. As a founding member of the steering committee for the newly named Alliance for Arts in the Research University (a2ru) hosted at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, he is working with colleagues from many of the country’s major institutions of higher education to build an organization which will promote, gather and disseminate best practices in the integration of the arts into research, curriculum and the student experience. The initial phase of this work is supported by a major 3-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Dr. Kim has been guest faculty at the St. Lawrence String Quartet Chamber Music Seminar at Stanford University, the Rotterdam Conservatory of Music, the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, and at the Banff Centre for the Arts. As a pianist, he made his solo debuts at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Washington D.C.’s Phillips Collection, his orchestral debut with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Lukas Foss, and was presented at the Marlboro Music Festival by then artistic director Rudolf Serkin.
