Moore College of Art selects new president

A Drexel art administrator will become the new president of Moore College of Art & Design, replacing long-time leader Happy Fernandez, officials announced Thursday morning.

Cecelia Fitzgibbon, who has been director of Drexel's Graduate Arts Administration Program for the last 16 years, will take the helm at the small private arts college in July.

Fernandez announced last May that she would be leaving Moore, at 20th and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, where she became president in 1999.

Fitzgibbon, 57, of Wilmington, was selected from about 40 candidates for the job at Moore, which enrolls more than 460 undergraduate students and more than 50 in graduate programs.

She starts in July.

"Her deep experience in academia and arts administration will be a great asset to the Moore community," Richard Hevner, chair of Moore's 11-member search committee and treasurer of the Board of Trustees, said in a prepared statement.

Fitzgibbon said she was looking to lead a school, and Moore seemed a perfect fit to use her skills and knowledge of the cultural community and her ability as a creative thinker.

"This is a chance to put those together to benefit Moore and make a difference," she said. "What could be better than that?"

She would like to see more involvement by the faculty, possibly by creating a faculty assembly to focus on curriculum issues, and she said she will be open to discussing the role of full-time and part-time professors at the school. As a visual arts college, Moore likes the model of putting professionals in the classroom to teach and mentor students. The faculty includes 24 full-time and 85 part-time educators.

A further integration of technology also will be on her plate. The school recently gave all of its freshmen iPads.

"That comes easy for me because I come from Drexel and we're a technology university," she said.

She'll also look to forge more alliances with institutions such as The Barnes.

Moore, the only women's arts college in the country, recently began accepting men into its graduate programs. There's no current plan to consider men in undergraduate programs, she said.

"Right now, that's not on the books to look at," she said.

Born in Camden, N.J., Fitzgibbon got her bachelor's in landscape architecture and regional planning from the University of Massachusetts and her master's in arts administration from New York University.

She previously served as director of the Delaware Division of the Arts, and she's been involved in various cultural research and planning projects.

At Drexel, Fitzgibbon also was a professor of leadership and transition and served as department head of the college's Arts and Entertainment Enterprise.

While she is not an artist, she is married to a painter, Scott Cameron, and has two sons, Stuart, who works at the PFM Group in Philadelphia and Ross, a junior at Bard College majoring in biology but also a musician, painter and poet.

"We live, sleep and breathe the arts," she said.

Fitzgibbon plans to get a residence in Philadelphia, she said.