Biography

Courtney Davis is the Dean of the School of the Arts. Having taught art history at Utah Valley University since 2007, she was most recently the Department Chair of the Art & Design Department. Courtney has been recognized as the UVU Alumni Outstanding Educator of the Year for the School of the Arts on three occasions and has also twice received a Faculty Senate Award of Excellence. Courtney, who helped to develop the Art History program at UVU, is the founder and director of the Art & Design Department's biennial art history symposium, a tradition that began in 2010. Courtney holds a Masters of Art in Art History & Curatorial Studies and a Juris Doctor, both from Brigham Young University. She teaches a range of art history courses, focusing on the history of art from the nineteenth century to the contemporary era.

Courtney's research areas include early eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European painting, the American Gilded Age, contemporary art, and copyright law. She recently won an international award for her paper, "So Sue Me: Legal Actions as a New Staging Ground for Performance Art," which was delivered at the American University in Paris in 2017 and published in the Arts & Society Annual Review in 2018. Her paper, "Intellectual Theft or Creative License? Copyright Education in the Visual Arts," was honored by the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters with the award of Best Paper, Arts Division in 2017.