Episode 27: New Hampshire Institute of the Arts
Kent Devereaux is the President and Chief Academic Officer of the New Hampshire Institute of Art (NHIA), a private, nonprofit, accredited college of the arts located in Manchester, New Hampshire, approximately one hour’s drive north of Boston.
An accomplished educator and academic leader, Kent’s career has taken him around the world and back again. Before assuming the presidency at the New Hampshire Institute of Art in January 2015, Kent served as Professor and Chair of the Music Department at Cornish College of the Arts, where he also served as Artistic Director for the college’s presenting series, Cornish Presents, and where he co-founded and directed the Seattle Jazz Experience, a youth jazz festival—the latter earning him Downbeat magazine’s Jazz Education Achievement Award in 2014 and Cornish College of the Arts Distinguished Alumni Award in 2015. Kent also served on the faculty of both the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the California Institute of the Arts for many years.
In addition to his experience in traditional academia, Kent spent over a decade working in the technology and online education sectors including stints as Senior Vice President of Editorial and Product Development at Encyclopedia Britannica, where he was instrumental in transforming that storied educational publisher from a print to online business model in the 1990s, and as Senior Vice President and Dean of Curriculum at Kaplan University, where during his tenure enrollment at the for-profit online university expanded from 350 to over 45,000 students.
Kent’s collaborations with other artists have been presented around the world including performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, the London International Theatre Festival (LIFT), and elsewhere. Kent’s own work as a director, composer, and performance artist has also been presented at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, Seattle’s On the Boards, and Minneapolis’ Walker Arts Center, among other venues.
Originally from California, Kent studied music composition with Gordon Mumma while attending the University of California at Santa Cruz, jazz piano, composition, and arranging with Art Lande, Anthony Braxton, Gil Evans, and Jim Knapp at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, and further graduate studies at Stanford University with legendary computer music pioneer John Chowning. A passion for exploring the related arts also led Kent to Chicago where he earned a Master of Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and to Indonesia, as a Fulbright Fellow to study Javanese shadow puppetry and its music.