Founded in 1882, the Cleveland Institute of Art is an independent college of art and design committed to leadership and vision in all forms of visual arts education. CIA makes enduring contributions to art and education and connects to the community through gallery exhibitions, lectures, a continuing education program and the Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque.
Fall 2022
News for Alumni and Friends of the Cleveland Institute of Art
New era at CIA Kathryn Heidemann, CIA’s first female president in 100 years, looks to the future By Carlo Wolff Kathryn Heidemann is all over town, dropping in on exhibitions showcasing artists from Cleveland and beyond. “Every night this week, I have a different FRONT International event,” she said in mid-July. Heidemann wasn’t complaining, she was celebrating. Contemporary art is busting out all over Northeast Ohio, and the Cleveland Institute of Art is part of all of it. Scores of CIA faculty, staff and alumni have work in FRONT as well as the concurrent CAN Triennial. And this is now her world. On July 1, Heidemann became the College’s 11th president and CEO. She succeeds her mentor, Grafton Nunes, who in 2019 persuaded her to leave the assistant deanship she loved at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to be CIA’s Senior Vice President of Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty. A force in arts education for decades and a fourth-generation educator, Heidemann is eager to broaden the impact of CIA, a school positioned to play a major role in the modernization of Cleveland. Heidemann, 44, recently welcomed Greg Watts and Kari Weaver to CIA. Watts is the new Vice President of Academic Affairs and Dean of
Faculty, Weaver the Director of the school’s brand-new Jane B. Nord Center for Teaching + Learning. The Nord Center aims to help CIA faculty hone their teaching skills and better support evolving needs of today’s learners. It is a key component of the 2020–25 Strategic Plan Heidemann helped formulate. Nunes unified the campus, streamlined administration, smoothed out faculty relations, and kept CIA afloat through the pandemic. Now that her administration is in place, Heidemann plans to turn up the volume.
CIA President + CEO Kathryn Heidemann took office on July 1. Photo by Matthew Greene / Matthew Green Photography.
deprived of that, of rites of passage they would have experienced had COVID not gotten in the way. “Keeping our community safe has always been very important, because if we can’t be in-person, we don’t have a school,” she adds. Heidemann worked on COVID planning even as she managed the school’s reaccreditation, a process that takes place every 10 years. “A president’s initial role really is to understand the inside of an organization,” she says. “I already did that.” She laughs. “Now I’m ready to go out.”
An inside job
The education of Kathryn Heidemann
When Heidemann joined CIA, she was focused on the innards of the school—especially when COVID was rampant.
Heidemann was born in Detroit and grew up there as well as in Australia, Venezuela and Germany.
During the last three years, she got to know faculty, students and staff, but there were no alumni events, and “all the things out there were closed, canceled, suspended. I feel that now, for the first time, I am finally starting to get an external view of what we do and really understand the broad reach that we have, even internationally.” According to an internal poll, this fall’s incoming class is most excited for their CIA experience to provide independence, friends and community. “Art and design are important,” she says, “but this is first and foremost a community, and these new students for the last couple of years have been
Her brother is a chef, one sister is an art therapist and singer, and her other sister recently started at Toyota. Her mother holds both a master’s degree and bachelor’s degree in education and comes from a deeply rooted lineage of teachers and school administrators. Her father, a Vietnam veteran with an MBA and a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering, worked in the operations division of Jeep, then a brand of AMC Motors. In the early ’80s, Jeep was moving plants overseas, and the Heidemann family found itself outside Brisbane, Australia, where Kathryn learned how to read, write and speak (she has shed her Australian accent). 1 Continued on page 4