Following Stephen Green's retirement, the Victoria Conservatory of Music has announced Tricia Baldwin will be the new dean starting on June 1 after a "highly competitive" international search.
"Tricia Baldwin comes to Victoria Conservatory at a time of enormous possibility, and no small amount of responsibility to our community, beginning with music students and instructors,” said Shelley Williams, chair of the board of governors, in a news release.
Baldwin, who will start the job on June 1, is a graduate of the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto and the MBA program at the Schulich School of Business, York University. In addition, she studied at the Royal Conservatory of Music and was awarded the Queen's Human Rights Initiative Award for her work initiating the Isabel Human Rights Arts Festival.
“This is a most exciting and challenging time for the arts, with the call for significant community engagement and the diversification of art forms, curriculum, and impact of music education institutions on the community,” she noted in the release. “Clearly, there is an abundance of vision at the Conservatory, and I believe it has a bright future given its high artistic and educational standards, its educational programmatic excellence and diversity, its beautiful concert spaces, its enthusiastic volunteers, and its demonstrated passion for supporting artists."
She also spent 14 years in leadership positions at the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and Chamber Choir where she was part of a team that created the Tafelmusik Baroque Summer Institute for pre-professional artists, and she helped spearhead the creation of the Tafelmusik Media recording label.
Most recently, she served as executive director of the Kwanlin Dun Cultural Centre in Whitehorse, where her mandate included mentoring a next-generation Indigenous leader to succeed her in leading the organization,
“Tricia comes to Victoria with an exciting combination of artistic, producing and financial leadership experience, along with a rich background in curriculum design and development, academic and practicum studies, experiential learning, evaluation rubrics, and program innovation,” said Nathan Medd, Conservatory CEO, in the release. “Tricia is also recognized for her deep respect and support for Indigenous music and artists, through intercultural commissioning, presentation and through her recent leadership of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation Cultural Centre on the Yukon River. We are thrilled to work with her in the coming years.”
