University of Texas at Austin College of Fine Arts alumni

Ethel Fisher (née Blankfield; 1923–2017) was an American painter whose career spanned more than seven decades in New York City, Miami and Los Angeles. Her work ranges across abstraction and representational genres including large-scale portraiture, architectural "portraits," landscape and still-life, and is unified by a sustained formal emphasis on color and space. After studying at the Art Students League in the 1940s, Fisher found success as an abstract artist in Florida in the late 1950s, and began exhibiting her work nationally and in Havana, Cuba. Her formative work of this period embraced the history of art, architecture and anthropology; she referred to it as "abstract impressionist" to distinguish her approach to form and color from that of Abstract Expressionism.
Fisher is best known for her portraits of fellow artists from the 1960s, and for grid-like, architectural paintings of the facades of urban cast-iron buildings, from the 1970s. Her figurative work employs color fields and architectural details as abstract shapes to create tension between her subjects and their surroundings and impart psychological depth. Her later, carefully rendered interiors and still lifes often include reproductions of works by well-known artists.Fisher's work was written about in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, ARTnews and Artweek, and belongs to the public collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and Crocker Art Museum, among others. She died in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles in 2017, at age 94.

Louis Gardner Lane (December 25, 1923 – February 15, 2016) was an American conductor. He was born in Eagle Pass, Texas. He studied composition with Kent Kennan at the University of Texas at Austin where he earned his bachelor's in music degree in 1943, and with Bohuslav Martinů at the Tanglewood Music Center (summer 1946), and with Bernard Rogers at the Eastman School of Music (master's degree in music, 1947). He also studied opera with Sarah Caldwell (1950).
He was apprentice conductor to George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra in 1947. He became assistant conductor there 1955-1960 and associate conductor 1960-1970 and resident conductor 1970-1973. A comment made by George Szell to Lane in 1957 about the eccentric pianist Glenn Gould became quite famous: “That nut’s a genius”. Gould requested Lane to accompany his subsequent performances in Cleveland, and Lane's Canadian conducting debut was made in 1960 at the Vancouver Festival with Gould.
Lane's programming with the Cleveland Orchestra led to his receiving two major awards, the Mahler Medal and the Ditson Conductor's Award.He was music director of the Akron Symphony Orchestra 1959-1983 (later becoming their conductor emeritus) and the Lake Erie Opera Theatre 1964-1972. He was principal guest conductor of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and held other positions with that group 1973-1978. He is given credit for developing that orchestra into a full-time group with a 52-week contract.He was co-conductor of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra 1977-1983. He was also principal guest conductor 1982-1983 and principal conductor 1984-1985 of the National Symphony Orchestra of the South African Broadcasting Corporation based in Johannesburg.
He was adjunct professor at the University of Akron 1969-1983 and a visiting professor at the University of Cincinnati 1973-1975. Lane served as artistic adviser and conductor at the Cleveland Institute of Music for over 20 years from 1982 through 2004 after which he served as faculty emeritus. He received an honorary doctorate from the same institution in 1995.He was also director of orchestra studies at Oberlin College 1995-1998 and at The University of Texas at Austin 1989-1992.

William Franklin Lee III, aka Bill Lee (February 20, 1929-October 23, 2011) was an American jazz pianist, composer, arranger, author, and music educator who was renowned for pioneering comprehensive music education, including jazz, at the collegiate level. He led the University of Miami School of Music and was the University of Miami's third music school dean from 1964 to 1982.In 1989, Lee retired from the University of Miami but continued to work in music education at other institutions. He was distinguished professor emeritus of music theory and composition and emeritus composer in residence. Lee was vice-president and provost at the University of Miami and president and executive director of IAJE.His son Will Lee played bass guitar for Late Night with David Letterman and Late Show with David Letterman.