Earlier this week, as students settled in across campus, Deborah F. Rutter began her job as vice provost for the arts at Duke University. She was hired following a national search and succeeds John Brown Jr., who resigned in late June after five years in the position.
The role is an impactful one, overseeing Duke Arts and the general direction of arts at the university during a fraught time for higher education. But hiring Rutter, who has decades of experience in the arts, is high-profile in other ways: She most recently served as president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, beginning in 2014—the first woman to head the nation’s cultural center. In February, President Trump fired Rutter amid a politicized purge of the institution that shocked and angered many artists, appointing himself as chair and Richard Grenell, an administration loyalist, as interim president.
A shift from nonprofit arts administration to a university setting is a profound change, but Rutter, who received an honorary Doctor of Arts degree from Duke in 2023, tells the INDY that she feels confident in her ability to serve the university in this next era: “I think that the president and the provost of Duke University did not hire me with their eyes closed, but with intentionality.”
In late August, the INDY spoke to Rutter via video call, in between her time packing up her Washington, D.C. home as she prepared to move to Durham and start a new chapter. At the Kennedy Center, Rutter made her most significant mark with the REACH, a campus expansion that added educational and public-facing spaces. At Duke, Rutter stresses a commitment to getting to know the Triangle’s arts landscape and deepening community collaborations. She also says she is looking to find a piano teacher in Durham.
INDY: What drew you to this position?
Deborah Rutter: I have been in senior leadership positions within performing arts organizations for a long time—many, many decades—and as I was thinking about what I wanted to do after being at the Kennedy Center, it became clear that there are so many big ideas and impactful projects that I still wanted to engage in. I didn’t want to walk away from an active life of contributing to the world of art and culture, but I needed a different environment.
What is one of the first things you’re going to do when you get to Duke? What is opening week going to look like for you?
I believe that fate has a lot to do with a lot of things. As soon as I was public, as soon as we had announced it, I looked at the calendar and realized I needed to figure out where I was going to live, and that I could come see the American Dance Festival [ADF] at the same time because it’s at Duke. So that’s who I am—a consumer of art and culture. And, you know, it’s been a drought for me for the last six months. It used to be that I would go to five, six, seven events a week, and I’m down to less than a couple of dozen over the last six months. It’s going to be fun.
I’m already looking at what is taking place. Late August is not the busiest time for programming, unless it’s the outdoor programming, which is great. But the happy coincidence of the opening Arts Week and my starting is pretty fantastic, because I’ll be doing something every day, every night.
You’re a bit familiar with Duke already, because your daughter, I believe, went to Duke. What are the ways that you’re going to get to know Duke and also the broader community?
I got to know East Campus and then downtown Durham, because my daughter’s a foodie and knew all of the great places to go. She lived on …Ninth Street, so I feel like I know that area. But for me, in this role, I really need to understand the culture and the people. I have a personal philosophy that every community has a culture to it. I didn’t [always] understand this—I grew up in Los Angeles and thought everybody was like Los Angeles, but then I started going to other places in the world, and worked in other cities, and I realized that every community has a personality and a culture to it.
So while I know Duke and I know restaurants, and can drive around a little bit—I’ve been in the Nasher, the Rubenstein Art Center, and some of the other theaters—I don’t really know it, and I don’t know the personality of Durham, of Duke, of the Triangle. It’s important for me to really understand how people feel, think, react.
How do you see arts programming intersecting with education?
I am a stalwart believer that every person learns differently and with different skills. Some learn by reading, some by doing, some people need to live it out. Everybody learns in a different way and feels drawn to learning from different stimuli. I saw this myself, because I had opportunities in the arts—I started out in public school and then chose to go to places where I could continue to explore my interest in the arts, not ever even initially having an idea that I would work in the arts as a mother. I watched my child learn through arts integration: She was much better at history, language, even math and science, by having it integrated with art.
There is a connection that you and I, and my colleagues, understand, but the rest of the world does not always understand, which is that art is central to who we are as human beings. Everything that we do and experience has creativity central to it. Even the historian and how they put their story together, sharing it with others, is using a level of creativity. This is something that I’ve only really been able to understand more fully and develop a little in my head, but to be in a university setting, and for us to be able to say art and creativity and culture define everything that we do—biology, environmental sciences, computers, computer science, politics—it’s all about art and culture. So why do we segregate it?
Well, this is kind of a segue to my next question, which is that it’s obviously a difficult moment in higher education, and I know there has been concern from alumni and others that Duke Arts has shrunk and there’s been significant staff turnover. What are your thoughts on bolstering confidence in the program and reinforcing its importance in the larger landscape of Duke?
I’m very excited to work with Alec Gallimore, the provost. He comes from Michigan, which has a long history of really robust arts programming. Now, they have been focused on presenting, and one of the things that is fascinating about this team is the connection between faculty and Duke Arts programming, and the way in which it’s been networked to student engagement.
I think we’ve got to figure out how we can have impact, how we can fit into the university and help advance the larger university initiatives, as well as understanding what it means to have an arts life as a human being.
I think that the president and the provost of Duke University did not hire me with their eyes closed, but with intentionality. And I think we’ve got to figure out how we can have impact, how we can fit into the university and help advance the larger university initiatives, as well as understanding what it means to have an arts life as a human being, and help the student body and the faculty have that. But I think that if they were looking for somebody who is going to shrink it, then maybe I’m not the right person for that. I’m not trying to come in and say, you know, “What we’re doing is more important than everything else.” We’re working with everybody to help ensure that we’ve got a really strong program and that it supports the larger initiatives, but I see it as having a great partnership with folks across the university.
Can you talk about some of the programming that you’re looking forward to?
So, you know that I worked with orchestras for a long, long, long time—
And are a musician yourself, I believe?
Exactly, and I need a piano teacher—I mean, I’ll call out here, if anybody wants to tell me where I should find my next piano teacher. But what I loved about coming to the Kennedy Center was the fact that we had all of the arts, anything that you could imagine putting on a stage or putting into an exhibit, we did. And this really fed my soul significantly. What’s really cool, when you look at the Duke Arts programming, is the breadth and depth.
If you look at that first week [of Duke Arts’ programming], it’s like the buffet table of my dreams, just because of the variety of artists and the traditional programming, along with some of the more edgy stuff. And there are a few spaces in there for me to be able to see things that are being done elsewhere by others. I’m not assuming that we’re the only presenters, because we’re not—there’s a lot of other artists in the Durham-Chapel Hill area.
There are some things in there that I know, and there are some things I don’t know, and I’m really excited about things I don’t know. I saw Alonzo King LINES during [ADF], and I’d seen it in DC a year and a half ago when it was here, and to see it again in a different setting and in a different time was very powerful and moving. I was really transfixed—I think I was still sort of absorbing its freshness when it was at the Kennedy Center. But even the things that I’ve seen before, I know I’ll have a different point of view, because I’ll be with a different audience.
Audiences make a huge difference to what the chemistry in the room is like, and therefore, every performance is different from city to city for an artist on tour, because it’s based on the audience. So I’m looking forward to getting to know the audience.
I think what you’re speaking to about audiences is remarkable to witness and experience in Durham. You get that energy from students and then people in Durham who really seek the arts out, and there are also just so many artists here. I’m constantly surprised to find out that an artist I know of and love has a North Carolina connection.
I wouldn’t just go to any university. Going to an area where the arts have a really robust character was important, you know, because you could go to any number of universities in any number of different places, but there’s something special here.
You feel it, you know it, you know—all of the different kinds of artists who are thriving in the Durham community, it’s beautiful. I’m looking forward to that.
Is there anything we didn’t touch on that you’d like to talk about?
In each meeting that I’ve had with the Duke Arts people, there’s been a real, heartfelt, genuine interest in connecting to the Durham arts community. I don’t know whether that is normal or not, but I thought it was unique, because there are places where it’s like, “Well, this is our performance, and you guys are lucky because we’re going to present that to you.”
That’s not the attitude that I have heard and felt from this team at all. It’s about, “Who do we work with? How do we collaborate to make one plus one equal three or even more? How do we raise up our colleagues in this community? How do we partner with the folks at UNC, when appropriate, or other arts organizations?” It’s a very generous approach.
The collaborations and programming for American Tobacco, where they’ve said, “We invite you to be the curator”—that’s very special. I did not know that before. I had all these conversations, so I was curious. The first questions I was asking were, “How do you put your programs together? How do you think about this?” Clearly, collaboration off campus and on campus is a big piece of it, and that will always make it stronger.
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