Dean appointments: Lynn Tomaszewski & Michael Stone-Richards

Cranbrook Educational Community announced that after a comprehensive search, two deans have been appointed to senior leadership positions at Cranbrook Academy of Art.

Lynn Tomaszewski has been named the Dean of Academic Affairs and Michael Stone-Richards has been named Dean of Programs and Partnerships. They will begin their tenure later this month.

As Dean of Academic Affairs, Tomaszewski will work with the senior leadership team to formulate, implement, and evaluate the academic policies and programs of the Academy. She will provide support to the Academy’s 13 Artists-in-Residence/Department Heads while helping to foster an equitable and transparent student culture. Her work will also focus on student retention and recruitment efforts.

As the Dean of Programs and Partnerships, Stone-Richards will work in a curatorial role to increase representation within the graduate curriculum, and to expand audiences across the Academy. He will also conduct direct outreach to develop and support active partnerships in the City of Detroit and work closely with the Academy Director to steward major gift initiatives of the Gilbert Family Foundation.

“The search for a new Academic Dean for the Academy presented us with two extraordinary candidates, each with specific backgrounds as leaders in higher education and the arts,” said Paul Sacaridiz, the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Director of Cranbrook Academy of Art. “After we met with them, we decided to create two unique roles that help advance the strategic goals of the Academy. This is a significant moment as we move forward, and I could not be more delighted to welcome Lynn and Michael to Cranbrook and have them serving as members of our senior leadership team.”

Lynn Tomaszewski comes to Cranbrook from Moore College of Art and Design, where she served most recently as the Chief Academic Officer/Academic Dean. She has 25 years of experience in higher education, also serving as the Director of the School of Art and Art History at the University of Florida, the Associate Dean of Graduate Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Chair of Foundations at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, where she was on the faculty for 16 years. She also served on the faculty of the Art Students League of New York.

“I am thrilled to be joining the amazing community of Cranbrook,” said Tomaszewski. “Since its inception, Cranbrook artists, designers, and architects have contributed experimental and influential objects and ideas to the world. I am honored to be given the opportunity to build upon that incredible legacy.”

Tomaszewski is also a visual artist whose interdisciplinary practice is informed by science, and she often accumulates images or actions into unified perceptual fields. She received a BFA in studio art from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MFA in printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. It is in the public collections of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Center for Contemporary Art in Sacramento, California.

Michael Stone-Richards is a writer, scholar, and educator who has taught at Northwestern University, Stonehill College, and the College for Creative Studies. Born in the West Indies, he was educated in England and in Europe, where he studied philosophy, poetry, and art history. He holds an MA and PhD in Modern European Art from the Courtauld Institute, and his writing on poetry, philosophy, art writing, and art pedagogy has been widely published in English and French. Through his work on Social Practice, Michael is interested in the role of care, attention, and conversation in creating insights or passages of intimacy among strangers and friends.

Michael has served on the founding Program Committee of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), the Friends of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Detroit Institute of Arts, Culture Lab Detroit, and most recently the Modern Ancient Brown Foundation, founded by Cranbrook Academy of Art graduate McArthur Binion (MFA Painting 1973). With his wife, Addie Langford (MFA Ceramics 2006), who is also an Academy of Art graduate, Michael co-founded the publication, Detroit Research. He has lectured nationally and internationally and has been awarded many grants and fellowships – including serving as a Visiting Scholar in the Critical Studies program at Cranbrook Academy of Art during the 2019-2020 academic year.  He also served as a Fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal, and the Alice Berlin Kaplan Center for the Humanities, Northwestern. He recently received a Warhol Foundation Grant for his upcoming book, Care of the City, proposing a theory of care and Social Practice (Sternberg Press).

“I am humbled and excited to be joining Cranbrook and its extraordinary history of experimental artists, thinkers, designers, and curators, consistently at the forefront of contemporary art and design,” said Stone-Richards. “The Academy has deep reserves of inspiration on which to draw for future initiatives. My ambition is to build upon this history while developing programming, partnerships, and a critical studies program worthy of the best of Cranbrook and the new challenges of our time.”