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Marcus Hayes has an exceptional academic background that includes serving on the board of directors for the American College Dance Association, serving as president of the Tennessee Association of Dance, completing an invited Dramaturgy for Dance Residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Alberta, Canada, and authoring the textbook “Introduction to Dance: Understanding Dance as an Art Form.”

Dean Hayes has interdisciplinary professional and research interests that range from local to global. He completed a year-long collaboration with the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, and he also conducted ethnographic research related to West African influences on Latin American folk dances in Colombia, Argentina and Uruguay. Dean Hayes sees dance as a catalyst for artistic collaboration. “Dance is interdisciplinary in its very nature because it so often involves music, visual arts and creative writing, history, kinesiology and physics. My personal experience as a collaborative artist will serve as a blueprint for building the exciting opportunities within the Creative School.” 

Hayes looks forward to positioning the Creative School to attract and graduate the most innovative thinkers – using a wide range of creative tools (e.g., art, music, film, creative writing, theatre, design, technology) – and to working with faculty colleagues to develop new ways of helping students across the university integrate creativity into their curricular and cocurricular experiences. 

“I think students will be excited to find many interesting connections between the disciplines housed in the Creative School and to see how their studies in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, as well as the School of Business and Leadership, are related and interdependent,” Hayes said. “I want students to engage in a wide range of opportunities to ignite creativity, imagination and creative problem-solving – especially as we enter the age of artificial intelligence, virtual reality and extended reality. Also, I hope they will consider the concepts of aesthetics, composition, criticism, design fundamentals and creative research that informs contemporary art making.”

Hayes received his undergraduate degree in dance and history from Beloit College and his master of fine arts degree in dance from Mills College.