Dane Webster

Dane Webster is the new Director of the School of Art. Previously he was at the University of Colorado Denver, where he served as the Director of the Digital Animation Center (DAC) program and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs for the College of Arts and Media. Prior to that, he was at Virginia Tech for 12 years, where he started their 3D computer animation program within the School of Visual Arts. While there, he also created and served as Director of the MFA in Creative Technologies and was a Senior Fellow with the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology which promotes research and education at the boundaries between art, design, engineering, and science.

Dane has extensive experience in administration, fundraising, technology and both international and interdisciplinary collaboration. His artwork has been shown in numerous juried art exhibitions and international film festivals. In addition to his own art practice, he has created a variety of different visualization used to fundraise for building projects on the Virginia Tech campus, teach Native American history to student as part of state learning objectives, communicate complicated disaster simulations to the public, and inform visitors at the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum about various animals, like vampire bats. He is a photographer, animator, visualizer, and creative coder.

"I focus on the notion that, by their very design, universities hold a transdisciplinary conference on their campuses every single day. In addition to working with other artists, I have collaborated with researchers in computer science, music, math, mechanical engineering, disaster science, history, weather, social science, and education. This is my intellectual community and scholarly context.”

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