Bruce Levitt, professor and former chair of Cornell University's Department of Theatre, Film and Dance, has been named faculty director of the Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA).

In this position, Levitt will be the arts liaison between all Cornell faculty members in the arts and CCA's advisory dean, Porus Olpadwala, who also is dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning. Levitt will work directly on campus arts issues with Anna Geske, CCA's executive director.

The CCA has been a potent force for arts sponsorship since its inception, offering grants and other forms of support to arts initiatives on campus and in the community. A 1998-99 sampler: Mind, Memory and Creativity, an interdisciplinary arts course coordinated by writer Diane Ackerman, received a faculty grant. And community outreach grants supported such initiatives as the West Danby "Art Church," an art installation and performance project involving Cornell choreographer and dance faculty member Jim Self, students in art, architecture, theater, film and dance and Danby community members. The Corn Street Garden, an easy-care garden and play area in an Ithaca downtown neighborhood designed and constructed by Felecia Davis, assistant professor of architecture, and a group of architecture, planning and landscape architecture students, was another outreach grant recipient.

"The arts are at the heart of any campus and any community," said Elizabeth Rawlings, wife of Cornell President Hunter Rawlings. An active advocate for the arts, Rawlings serves on the advisory council of Cornell's Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art and on the Johnson Museum Community Advisory Committee. "Cornell's arts outreach efforts give us the potential to help shape our community's character and make it the kind of place that people want to come to," she said. She hopes to see the arts on campus and in the community flourish and grow under Levitt's CCA leadership.

According to Levitt, there are 155 faculty in the creative, performing and applied arts at Cornell in four of the university's colleges. The College of Arts and Sciences -- with its departments

of Music; Theatre, Film and Dance; and its Creative Writing and Cornell Cinema programs -- houses the most faculty. The College of Architecture, Art and Planning is a close second -- most of

its programs are arts-related -- and the Johnson Museum is another essential player. But there are others, among them faculty in the College of Human Ecology's Department of Textiles and Apparel and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences' Department of Landscape Architecture, who are less obvious but also essential members of the arts community at Cornell. And Cornell Library's Rare and Manuscript Collections often organizes arts-related exhibitions, such as "Alison Lurie: Writer at Work," on view in the Carl A. Kroch Library's exhibition gallery through Jan. 28, 2000. Levitt hopes to meet informally with all of these faculty members this academic year to find out how the CCA might best serve them and the university community.

Levitt has been involved in teaching theater at Cornell since 1983, when he first came to campus as a visiting professor of directing. He joined the permanent theater faculty in 1986, when he became chair of Theatre, Film and Dance. Before joining the Cornell faculty, Levitt coordinated Columbia University's MFA directing program from 1980 to 1985 and headed the University of Iowa's MFA acting and directing programs from 1977 to 1980. Since 1996 Levitt also has been an artistic director of the celebrated Heart of America Shakespeare Festival in Kansas City, Mo. He earned his Ph.D. in theater history and directing from the University of Michigan in 1972.

The last Cornell faculty members to hold positions similar to Levitt's were James McConkey, professor emeritus of English, and Stephanie Vaughn, professor of English and director of Cornell's Creative Writing Program. McConkey was arts adviser to the provost and CCA faculty chair in 1992-94; and Vaughn held the post in 1994-95.