Ravi S. Rajan is the president of the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). Having studied music and worked with time-based and interactive media since 1993, he is an artist and producer whose work reaches across disciplines. Ravi is also a teacher and a leader with a reputation for developing innovative and visionary initiatives.
As an artist and producer, Ravi works on collaborative projects that create an immersive experience for the viewer, crossing many media including music, architecture, photography, film/video, drama, and performance, and collaborating with artists, choreographers, directors, playwrights, theaters, museums, and galleries around the world. Projects he has worked on have been seen at the Whitney Museum of Art, the São Paulo Biennial and Venice Biennale, and have shown at major venues for art, dance, music, and theatre in cities such as, Basel, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Chicago, Frankfurt, Guangzhou, Helsinki, Johannesburg, London, Madrid, Milan, Montreal, Moscow, New York, Paris, Santiago, Tokyo, and Warsaw. Ravi has also played and conducted for various productions, including Broadway shows, regional theaters, recordings, events, orchestras, and chamber groups, and has commissioned new collaborative works.
Before CalArts, Ravi worked as a teacher and leader at Purchase College, State University of New York (SUNY Purchase) in a number of roles, including as Director of the School of Art+Design, and as Dean over the six arts schools there. Prior to Purchase, he taught students from kindergarten through university at various institutions, and worked with Nobel Prize-winning scientists on multimedia projects at The Rockefeller University.
Ravi has degrees from Yale University and the University of Oklahoma and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts (UK) in 2010. He serves on, and has led as chair, various boards supporting democracy, social justice, diversity, the arts, and education worldwide, currently including Americans for the Arts, the Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities, and the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. He was a member of the TONY Awards Nominating Committee, and serves on many other selection groups that provide assistance, scholarship, fellowships, and recognition to artists and arts organizations.
He and his wife, opera specialist and music director Lucy Tucker Yates, live in Los Angeles with their two sons ages 9 and 12.
