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About Us

In fall of 2009 the Department of Visual and Performing Arts became the Patti and Rusty Rueff School of Design, Art, and Performance in the College of Liberal Arts. Today, the school is composed of three departments, Art and Design, Music, and Theatre, and two divisions, Dance, and Film and Video; in summer 2024, the Division of Dance will merge with Theatre to become the Department of Theatre and Dance. The Rueff School also includes Purdue Galleries

The Rueff School includes over 850 undergraduate students and roughly 60 graduate students. With many courses in the University Core, several thousand students across campus annually enroll in the arts. We offer the Bachelor of Arts, the Bachelor of Fine Arts, the Master of Arts, and the Master of Fine Arts in various disciplines, and a Ph.D. in Art Education.  The school's mission is to welcome and train a wide range of curious and talented students while also serving Purdue University and the Greater Lafayette community. The faculty is led by nationally and internationally recognized scholars and artists who bring that expertise and passion to the classroom.

The school is named for Patti and Rusty Rueff who are its principal benefactors. Their gift of $5 million in 2004 was the largest gift ever received by the College of Liberal Arts at that time. The Patti and Rusty Rueff School of Design, Art, and Performance is primarily housed in Yue-Kong Pao Hall on Purdue's West Lafayette campus, with auxiliary facilities in the Forestry Products Building, the Elliott Hall of Music, and the Stewart Center. In addition to the traditional labs and studios needed for the arts, Yue-Kong Pao Hall includes two exhibition galleries, two dance studios, two theatres, and a professional recording studio.

Mission Statement

The school’s mission is to serve the citizens of Indiana, the United States, and the world through (1) Discovery, that expands the realm of knowledge of the visual and performing arts; (2) Learning, through dissemination and preservation of knowledge about the visual and performing arts; and (3) Engagement, through exchange of knowledge about visual and performing arts.