Kent Devereaux

Professor, Composition, Department Chair

kdevereaux@cornish.edu

Kent Devereaux is a composer, director, and producer of opera and music–theater who also has considerable experience working as a senior executive in higher education, media, and publishing. Most recently Devereaux served as Senior Vice President and acting Dean of Curriculum for Kaplan University, one of the world’s largest online universities. Prior to that, he was Senior Vice President in charge of editorial for Encyclopædia Britannica and oversaw their U.S., U.K., Australia, and India operations. He was previously the Andrew W. Mellon Visiting Professor in Criticism at the California Institute of the Arts and taught for many years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Devereaux’s artistic work includes collaborations with John Duykers, Janice Felty, Rinde Eckert, Herbert Perry, Paul Dresher, Leonard Pitt, Gusmiati Suid, Boi Sakti, Jarrad Powell, Tony Prabowo, Goenawan Mohamad, I Made Sidia, and Lynn Book, and performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, the London International Festival of Theatre, and the Granada International Theatre Festival. He has staged and directed his works at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, On the Boards in Seattle, and elsewhere.

Devereaux studied composition with Lou Harrison and David Cope, jazz arranging with Ray Brown, and electronic music with Gordon Mumma while attending the University of California at Santa Cruz. He studied classical and jazz composition with Janice Giteck, Bun–Ching Lam, Gil Evans, Art Lande, and Anthony Braxton at Cornish (B.F.A., 1982), performance art and technology at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (M.F.A., 1985), and later computer music with John Chowning at Stanford University. Devereaux has been the recipient of grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Arts International, as well as a Fulbright Fellowship to study Javanese shadow puppetry in Indonesia. You can read his arts criticism and musings on life on his blog.