Dan Hosken, CSUN’s new dean of the Mike Curb College of Arts, Media, and Communication.
Dan Hosken, former associate dean of the Mike Curb College of Arts, Media, and Communication at California State University, Northridge, has been named dean of the college.
Hosken, an electronic music composer and author, had been serving as the college’s interim dean for the past two years, following the retirement of Jay Kvapil.
“I’m really very excited,” Hosken said. “This is a great opportunity to start looking out toward the future of the college in longer distances — looking many years in the future, rather than just a few months.”
CSUN’s Mike Curb College of Arts, Media, and Communication has more than 4,800 undergraduate and 220 graduate students in myriad programs that span the arts and fields of communication. The college’s faculty, staff and students are inspired by the shared belief that arts are community, community is art, and art and communication are essential pillars for building and maintaining community. Its programs — in art, music, theatre, cinema and television arts, communication studies and journalism — have an international reputation for graduating skilled professionals who succeed in their respective fields.
Hosken said his time as interim dean has given him insight into the strengths and goals of the college’s six departments and its more than 360 tenured and tenure-track faculty members and lecturers.
He said he would like to strengthen and expand the college’s already-existing ties with local industries, such as the entertainment industry, and include the departments in his college, as well as links to “strong programs found all across the campus.”
“If an entertainment company needs accountants, we have amazing accountants coming out of the [David Nazarian College of Business and Economics]. If they need engineers, CSUN’s College of Engineering [and Computer Science] can help them,” he said. “This campus has a broad array of disciplines that can support the entertainment industry in all areas, and I would like to see CSUN’s reputation in the industry grow even stronger.”
He also would like to strengthen the Curb College’s ties with the community, Hosken said.
“The impact that we can have in the community, across all of our disciplines, is strong, but it can be even more coordinated and more visible,” he continued. “By working together collaboratively, we create great opportunities for our students and have a positive impact on the community and related fields in the arts, communications and media.”
Hosken noted that the way people share and tell their stories — whether through journalism, film, television, music or other means of communication — has changed dramatically over the past few years.
“Faculty in the Curb College have been at the forefront of many of these changes,” he said. “It’s an exciting time to be leading the college.”
Hosken, a native of Michigan, came to CSUN in 1999 as faculty in the Department of Music with an expertise in music technology. During his tenure at CSUN, he has served as assistant chair of the music department and as a member of the board of directors of The University Corporation. As a composer, his music has been performed in major cities around the world and has been featured at prominent festivals of electronic music.
He has a doctorate in music composition from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a master’s degree in composition with academic honors from the New England Conservatory of Music and a bachelor’s degree in humanities and science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.