Livaudais Named Interim Director of UA Little Rock School of Art and Design
Joli Livaudais, a professor of photography at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, has been named the interim director of the School of Art and Design.
“I am very excited at the opportunity to be in this leadership role,” Livaudais said. “We have some great faculty and programs here in a beautiful facility. I care deeply about giving a great education to our students and supporting the faculty.”
Livaudais is taking over for Thomas Clifton, who is serving as the interim dean of the College of Business, Health, and Human Services.
The UA Little Rock School of Art and Design offers engaging and inspiring art instruction at both the undergraduate and graduate levels that prepares students for fulfilling careers as professional artists and in museums, businesses, schools, and more. In this role, Livaudais is responsible for overseeing the approximately 35 faculty and staff who work in the school.
Housed in the Windgate Center of Art and Design, the school is the home to about 150 students pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in Art degree with concentrations in art education, art history, and studio art as well as a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art degree with emphasis areas in ceramics, drawing, graphic design, furniture design and woodworking, illustration, jewelry and metalsmithing, painting, photography, and printmaking. The school also has minors in applied design, art history, digital arts, photography, and studio art as well as certificate programs in applied design, graphic design, and photography.
Livaudais originally trained to work in the field of experimental psychology, earning a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in psychology from the University of Texas at Arlington. Feeling a pull toward photography, she spent two decades working as a commercial photographer in Dallas and Monroe, Louisiana. She earned her Master of Fine Arts from Louisiana Tech University in 2013 and joined UA Little Rock as an assistant professor of photography in 2014. Since 2017, she has also served as the graduate program coordinator for the School of Art and Design.
“UA Little Rock is a real gem of a program,” Livaudais said. “I was very excited to get the position, and it’s everything I could have hoped for.”
In 2020 and 2021, Livaudais’ work was featured in the “Paper Routes-Women to Watch 2020” exhibition series at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Her installation, “All That I Love,” contained 1,500 origami paper beetles of varying sizes made of aluminum, pigment ink, resin, and mulberry paper.
Livaudais’ most recent body of work involves historical process pieces, meaning photographic printing methods that were invented in the 1800s. Her latest exhibition, “Apophenia,” has been shown in Arkansas and Alabama this year.
