Provost Kessler
Richard Kessler was appointed Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs on August 5, 2025.
An accomplished higher education administrator, musician, teaching artist, and advocate, Provost Kessler previously was Executive Dean of the College of Performing Arts and Dean of Mannes since 2011. He was instrumental in The New School’s efforts to academically and physically integrate Mannes School of Music, School of Jazz and Contemporary Music, and School of Drama to create the College of Performing Arts in 2015. Under his leadership, the College of Performing Arts has introduced new degree programs, minors, and concentrations, and has fostered the recruitment of groundbreaking new ensembles in residence, including the JACK Quartet, The Westerlies, and Sandbox Percussion; a foundational partnership to move the highly influential experimental music venue, The Stone, into The New School; an expansion of the Mannes Composition department, making it one of the most important departments of its kind; and the hiring of major figures in the performing arts including Leila Josefowicz, Jennifer Koh, and Arturo O’Farrill.
Provost Kessler’s career in the arts, education, and academia spans more than three decades and is marked by a record of distinguished vision as a musician, educator, teaching artist, advocate, lobbyist, and organizational leader and consultant. Before his appointment as dean of Mannes in 2011, he served as executive director of the Center for Arts Education (CAE) from 2004 to 2011, where his work garnered him awards from the Music Educators Association of New York and the New York City Art Teachers Association/United Federation of Teachers. He previously was executive director of the American Music Center, where his work led to an ASCAP Deems-Taylor Award, and was senior vice president of Artsvision, an international arts education consulting company, where he led projects of national and international importance, including an arts focused part of Annenberg Foundation’s Challenge to The Nation—whose mission was to restore arts education to the New York City public schools, resulting in over $750 million in new funding, teachers, and arts supplies across the largest school district in the United States.
An accomplished musician, teaching artist and performer, Provost Kessler has performed with the New York City Ballet and the New York City Opera. He was a college faculty member at the Manhattan School of Music, overseeing and teaching brass chamber music, and a winner of the Walter W. Naumburg Chamber Music Award, as well as the Rafael Mendez International Brass Quintet Competition and the Artist International Competition. As a chamber musician, he commissioned and premiered works by major composers, including Arvo Part, Pauline Oliveros, Anthony Davis, and Ned Rorem. Provost Kessler received both his undergraduate and graduate degrees from The Juilliard School and attended Mannes for two years as an undergraduate student. He has served on the boards of the American Composers Orchestra, Great Minds, National Sawdust, and Chamber Music America, where he was board chair for almost a decade. Provost Kessler also served on the New York State Board of Regents’ Blue Ribbon Commission on Arts Assessment and its Task Force on K-12 Principal and Teacher Effectiveness.
Leadership
The Provost’s Office is led by a group of seasoned higher education professionals committed to academic excellence and the success of our students. Using data-informed approaches to decision making, our staff work together to ensure that our students
and faculty have the resources and support they need to excel in their research, scholarship, and creative practice. The work done by the Provost’s Office leaders and their teams is deeply collaborative, rooted in the open exchange of ideas, and aimed
at propelling our work forward in positive directions and fostering an environment in which our students, faculty, and staff can thrive.
The Provost's Office Key Initiatives are: