Leadership Bios

CalArts' President and Provost work in conjunction with the Institute's Board of Trustees, CalArts’ governing board.


President Ravi S. Rajan

Ravi S. Rajan is the president of the California Institute of the Arts. Having studied music and worked with time-based and interactive media since 1993, he is an artist and producer whose work reaches across disciplines. Ravi is also a teacher and a leader with a reputation for developing innovative and visionary initiatives.

Before CalArts, Ravi lived in New York City for 18 years. He held multiple leadership roles at Purchase College, State University of New York (SUNY Purchase), taught students from kindergarten through university at various institutions, and worked with faculty and artists on multimedia projects at Yale University and The Rockefeller University.

Ravi has degrees from Yale and the University of Oklahoma and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts (UK) in 2010. He has served on and has led various nonprofit boards supporting media, social justice, diversity, the arts, and education worldwide. He has been a member of the TONY Awards Nominating Committee, and serves on many other selection panels that provide assistance, scholarship, fellowships, and recognition to artists and arts organizations. He is married to Lucy Tucker Yates, who works in opera as a dramaturge, conductor, librettist, Italian specialist, translator, and coach, and they have two young sons ages 8 and 11.

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CalArts President Ravi Rajan

Provost Tracie Costantino

Tracie Costantino earned her undergraduate degree in art history and Italian studies at Boston College and her master’s degree in art history from Brown University. In 2005 she completed her PhD in aesthetic education (curriculum and instruction) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before CalArts, Costantino served as the interim Provost, Dean of Faculty and Associate Provost of Teaching and Learning at RISD, and prior to RISD was on the faculty at the University of Georgia for nine years.

Her teaching abilities have been recognized through the Richard B. Russell Award for Undergraduate Teaching, the General Sandy Beaver Teaching Professorship and participation in the Lilly Teaching Fellows program at the University of Georgia. Costantino's research focuses on the nature of cognition in the arts, creativity, and the transformative potential of aesthetic experience as an educative event. Her interest in interdisciplinary curriculum, STEAM, and creative learning has been supported by two grants from the National Science Foundation. In addition to numerous published articles and book chapters, Costantino has co-edited two books on aesthetic education: Essays on Aesthetic Education for the 21st Century (Sense Publishers, 2010) and Aesthetics, Empathy, and Education (Peter Lang Publishers, 2013).

Provost Tracie Costantino