After conducting national searches for two key positions at RISD, the Provost’s Office is pleased to announce the appointment of Patricia Phillips as our new dean of Graduate Studies and Rajesh Bellani as our new associate provost for Student Affairs.

A well-known arts writer, curator, educator and administrator, Patricia will begin leading the Graduate Studies Division on August 1. She comes to RISD from Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, where she has been a professor and chair of the Department of Art since 2007. For 16 years prior to that, she served as a professor, Art Department chair and dean of the School of Fine & Performing Arts at the State University of New York at New Paltz, where she earned the SUNY Chancellor’s Recognition Award for Research in 2002. Patricia has also worked as editor-in-chief of Art Journal, the quarterly magazine published by the College Art Association, and has held several relevant teaching and administrative positions at Parsons School of Design.

Raj Bellani will begin work at RISD in July, coming from Colgate University in Hamilton, NY, where he has worked for the past eight years in a variety of positions, including as assistant dean of Multicultural Affairs, associate director of Campus Life and most recently, associate dean of Academic Initiatives. Prior to his work at Colgate, he held student affairs positions at Wesleyan University, the State University of New York (SUNY) at Geneseo, The College of the Holy Cross and Western Illinois University (WIU). Having graduated with a BA in Political Science from SUNY Geneseo, Raj went on to earn an MS in College Student Personnel from WIU. In 2007, while working at Colgate, he completed his doctoral dissertation and graduated with an EdD from the University of Pennsylvania.

Members of the search committees and the larger RISD community look forward to welcoming these two new colleagues to our team this summer.