Meet the Dean: Spotlight on Dean Dan Hosken, Dean of the Mike Curb College of Arts, Media, and Communication

The world of entertainment is changing rapidly, and CSUN is poised to accommodate those changes, thanks to its array of strong entertainment programs including those in the Cinema and Television Arts Department, the Animation, Illustration, and Communication Design programs in Art and Design, and the Music Industry Studies and Media Composition programs in the Music Department — all part of the Mike Curb College of Arts, Media, and Communication. We talked to Dean Dan Hosken about how CSUN prepares its students for careers in Hollywood. Dean Hosken earned his bachelor’s degree from MIT, his Master of Music degree in composition from the New England Conservatory of Music, and his doctorate in music composition from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

How long have you been at CSUN, and what drew you here? 
This is my 26th year at Cal State Northridge, and I came here relatively fresh out of graduate school. I’m a composer as a musician, but I started as a physics major at MIT. Along the way I discovered a marriage between the creative and the technological, which is music technology. At the time, CSUN had a unique position available in music technology, and since that was my area of interest and expertise, I found a home here.  

It sounds like you were ahead of your time. 
Music technology has definitely grown and adapted over time. When I first started, music technology required very specialized facilities and computers. These days we have many options—we can even use our phones… the timing was just right. 

And even before I got here, the Music Department at CSUN had made some decisions about what is core to a musician’s education, specifically that music majors needed to understand music technology, to be conversant in it. So, a music technology class was created that every music major had to take. It was very forward thinking. That, and the Music Industry Studies and Media Composition programs made it possible to operate at a kind of nexus of the areas of music and technology. Being able to create with technology has always been interesting to me as a composer and as an educator.

What do you see as your primary responsibility as Dean?  
A dean is the senior administrator for a college, so I’m responsible for helping to frame the outward face of the college while managing its inward operations. I try to keep front of mind that the business of a university happens in the classroom between students and faculty. That’s where the magic happens. Every other aspect exists to support that relationship. So, the success of the students and the success of the faculty are at the core of our mission. 

The outward-facing element involves fostering engagement between the College and the cultural institutions, entertainment entities, and other industries to which we are relevant. And also that we see what’s happening in those spaces and bring it back to our own practices. We have to make sure we are continually engaging with our industry and cultural institution partners to ensure that we’re preparing students for careers after college.  

What are some of the challenges you and the College face these days? 
The College has the challenges that we all face, whether financial challenges, what we had to deal with during COVID, especially in performance and production, and what we are experiencing now in the world. But mostly it’s keeping the student-centric mission front and center and not let solving the immediate challenges become our mission.  

What are some of the accomplishments of which you are most proud?
In the Mike Curb College, we have some incredibly successful programs. For more than a decade now, our Cinema and Television Arts (CTVA) Department has been a perennial member of the top film school lists in the country. The Hollywood Reporter and Variety, along with other industry trade publications, put us alongside very prestigious, very private and very expensive institutions like NYU, USC, Chapman and others. And our Music Industry and Media Composition programs have been featured as top programs by Billboard and The Hollywood Reporter. As you know, CSUN is a predominately first-generation, Hispanic-serving institution, with the majority of our students being Pell Grant eligible. Those are all important aspects of what we do, our role in uplifting communities, and the fact that we can do that impactful work and still show up on the list of the top 25 film schools and music media schools. This success is a testament to the incredible work of our students, faculty, and staff and all of our partners across campus.

I’m also proud of the work we’ve done in the College to break down the barriers between our disciplines. The world is becoming increasingly collaborative, increasingly interdisciplinary. Students of any major have to be ready for that. 

On campus, we have CTVA that is about 25 yards from our Theatre department, where we train actors and designers and stage technicians. While these disciplines are closely connected in the broader world, they can be very siloed in higher education, and we are actively working to dismantle those silos.  
 
What are some of the other CSUN programs that help students find careers in Hollywood? 
We have screenwriters and composers, performers and animators who are honing their craft here. But someone has to negotiate those contracts. Someone has to create the business structures that allow projects to happen. We have a relatively new master’s degree program in Entertainment Industry Management, which is parallel to a master’s degree we have in Music Industry Administration. Both of those areas have undergraduate majors as well. 

And we have incredible faculty—many of them industry professionals—helping students understand what it means to be in this industry. Students have to be prepared for the hard skills—knowing the business and the new models they will be creating—as well as the soft skills, how to create relationships. Because that’s really what the businesses are.  

Any new or expanding programs in the near future?  
We are working on a new program in design and innovation in our Art and Design Department, and expanding our programming in what might be called immersive and interactive art and entertainment, meaning the alphabet soup of VR, AR, XR, etc. We have a strong animation program which includes game design courses, and we have the other components of game development—story, voice, sound, music—in the college, so there are some wonderful possibilities there. We’re also developing strength in virtual production, which you see in shows like The Mandalorian. 

A couple of years ago, I worked with my faculty and staff with tremendous support from campus leadership to secure $1 million in Community Project Funding for a project entitled “Advancing Equity in Entertainment and Information Media” through the U.S. House of Representatives championed by Congressman Brad Sherman. This funding has allowed us to purchase and install updated and state-of-the-art equipment for the CTVA, Broadcast Journalism, Animation, Illustration, Music Industry Studies, and Media Composition programs. And we’ve reinstated the Entertainment Industry Institute, a center that fosters connections between CSUN’s entertainment programs and the industry to support students making the college-to-career transition in entertainment, including programming such as “The Agent’s Journey,” with representatives from William Morris Endeavor and internship and professional opportunities. 

But you asked about challenges. Space is definitely a challenge. We have nearly 2,000 students in the CTVA, and 1,400 in the Art and Design department. We have a multi-camera studio sharing space with the LED volume and a green screen. Then we have to grapple with the new AI technologies and their impact on how we prepare students for the industry. It’s a lot to keep up with.  

And you have some very interesting personal projects—compositions that incorporate dance moves in your music.  Tell us about that.
I’m very interested in interactive music. One series of projects involved a motion-sensing environment in which motions create sounds, so that when a dancer moves their arm in a particular way, it generates sound and also shapes it dynamically. They make their body small versus wide, and it changes the soundscape, makes it louder, softer, higher, lower, etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp0Ilb6OERQ

So, the end story is that technology is racing ahead right now, and we are racing to grapple with it and make sure that we’re infusing it with the values that our faculty continue to instill in our students.  

For more, check out these news stories about the Mike Curb College at CSUN:
https://newsroom.csun.edu/tag/mike-curb-college-of-arts-media-and-communication/