Steve Peters - College of Fine Arts at University of Montevallo

Steve Peters, an ICFAD member for over a decade, is completing a one-year position on the ICFAD Board. In that capacity, he helped organize the Roundtable sessions for the Seattle conference and is co-authoring a forthcoming ICFAD publication with Dean Al Romero, a book in which ICFAD deans and associate deans share compelling personal stories about new creative practices in their work. Peters chaired ICFAD’s Cultivation and Stewardship Committee that organized the 2017 pre-conference Development Workshop for the Halifax conference and coordinated ICFAD’s 2018 summer Spoleto Festival experience for donor cultivation.

Peters has been Dean of the College of Fine Arts at University of Montevallo since 2014. His leadership at Montevallo has entailed positioning the arts as a driver of campus-wide innovation through new curricula in digital filmmaking and new media, cross-college partnerships, the construction of two multi-million-dollar fine arts facilities and a new “collaboratory” for the arts that opens in 2019.

An avid advocate for the arts, Peters is the founder of the Forte Festival, a creative placemaking and revitalization project linking artists and underserved, rural communities in Alabama. He was President of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, served on the boards of the Council of Colleges of Arts and Sciences and the Kansas Association for the Arts in Education, and he led the Wichita Arts Council Cultural Funding Committee that allocated annual, public funding for the city’s legacy and emerging arts organizations.