Texas Governor Greg Abbott recently appointed Jindal School alumnus Kevin Yu, MS ’03, to the Texas Commission on the Arts.
Yu, a professional violinist with the Las Colinas Symphony, will serve on the commission through August 2021. He also serves on the Greater Dallas Youth Orchestra’s board of directors.
An alumnus, Yu is founder and CEO of Coregami. The company specializes in what he calls “performal” wear — formal attire that keeps musicians comfortable during concert performances.
Yu laid the groundwork to his commission appointment by serving on boards of directors of such nonprofit organizations as the Greater Dallas Asian American Chamber of Commerce, where he served 10 years. He also served on the board of the Multi-Ethnic Education and Economic Development (MEED) Center and Chamber Music International.
Yu learned about his TCA appointment last month while in New York at Carnegie Hall for business.
Created by the Texas Legislature in 1965, the commission’s mission is to advance economic and cultural development in the State of Texas. The taxpayer-funded state agency invests in cultural tourism, art education and direct funding of nonprofit arts organizations, arts institutions and schools, local agencies, community groups and individual artists throughout the state.
More than $8.2 million of the agency’s $9.3 million operating budget in fiscal year 2017 is devoted to funding arts and cultural grants. Most of the funding comes directly from the state budget, but some of it comes from federal grants and custom license plate revenue.
Yu brings both entrepreneurial and musical perspectives to his new role. Classically trained, he has played the violin since age 7. He won awards in high school and planned on going to music school. After enrolling at UT Austin as a business major, he went to school during the day and by night worked at a startup and played violin professionally.
After graduating, he moved to San Francisco to work in Silicon Valley so he could take advantage of the first dot-com boom. He moved to Dallas a year later and opened his own consulting firm.
“I needed to understand numbers lots better,” he said. “That’s why I enrolled in the MS in Accounting and Information Management (now MS in Accounting) program at UT Dallas. It gave me the confidence I needed to take on the challenges that a small business requires.”
Yu said his business and his music “help one another tremendously. I’ve tried really hard to bring those two worlds together by serving on nonprofit boards and helping music organizations run with better governance. On the business side, I was the company musician at Atmos Energy for years.”
As a commissioner on the arts commission, Yu plans to create more opportunities for the two worlds to intersect.
Because the commission’s budget recently has been reduced, Yu hopes his accounting skills and artistic sensibilities will prove useful.
“In order for the arts to continue to grow in Texas, the organizations that support it must operate more independently, solvently and responsibly,” he said.
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