Source: https://art21.org/creativechemistries/contributors/
Timestamp: 2019-04-23 12:44:59+00:00

Document:
These 35 artists, educators and arts administrators planned events, participated in panel discussions and sparked debate on the relationship between art and education. Since February 2015 many of their professional roles have shifted and expanded, but these bios reflect what each them brought to Creative Chemistries at the start of 2015.
Fadwa Abbas was born and raised in Khartoum, Sudan, and immigrated to the United States at the age of 14. As a student, she experienced Catholic, British, American, international, public, and private education. She taught English to middle school, high school, and adult students in public and private schools and institutions in NYC.
John Abodeely is the Deputy Director of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. Prior roles include national arts education program development at Americans for the Arts and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and graduate professorships in education policy. John’s specialties include operations, trans-institutional partnerships, and the connection between policy and practice. He has an MBA from Johns Hopkins University.
Tomie Arai is a visual artist who collaborates with community residents, students, activists, and historians to create art in public spaces. She is a recent recipient of an San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) commission to create artwork for the new Central Subway Station in San Francisco Chinatown. In 2015 she will be co-teaching a course for artist educators at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.
Working in a magnet school for the Arts, Don Ball has been teaching with contemporary art since it was modern. He is developing open-minded experimentation in thinking and studio practice, and growing awareness and support in the appreciation and production of artworks relevant to students and their time.
Becca Belleville began teaching art in Baltimore City Public Schools in 2009 and joined ART21 Educators in 2013. She completed her MA in Art Education at Maryland Institute College of Art and published, “Blogging, Zines, and Narratives: New Dialogues in Art History” in Art Education magazine in 2014.
Mark Bradford was born in 1961 in Los Angeles, CA, where he lives and works. In 1997, Bradford graduated with a BFA and MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, CA. Bradford is a recipient of the 2014 National Medal of the Arts. Other major awards include The MacArthur Fellowship (2009) and the Bucksbaum Award, granted by the Whitney Museum of American Art (2006). Bradford has shown extensively in international and national exhibitions.
Luis Camnitzer is a German-born Uruguayan artist and writer who has lived in New York since 1964. He was at the vanguard of 1960s Conceptualism, working primarily in printmaking, sculpture, and installations. Camnitzer’s artwork explores subjects such as social injustice, repression, and institutional critique. His humorous, biting, and often politically charged use of language as art medium has distinguished his practice for over four decades.
Flossie Chua is a researcher and project manager at Project Zero-Harvard University, focusing on how we might prepare young people to live, work, and play in the complex and dynamic twenty-first century. Currently, her work involves studying what learning that matters looks like in schools, and how we might prepare young people to grapple productively and insightfully with complexity, as well as develop globally competent and new media literate dispositions through an interdisciplinary and journalistic treatment of global issues.
Dipti Desai is Associate Professor and Director of the Graduate Art + Education Programs at New York University. As a scholar and artist-educator, her work addresses the intersection between visual art, activism, and critical pedagogy.
Marit Dewhurst has worked as an educator and program coordinator in multiple settings both nationally and abroad including community centers, museums, juvenile detention centers, and international development projects. Her recent book, Social Justice Art: A framework for activist art pedagogy, highlights her research on youth activism in the arts.
Raygine DiAquoi is an educator and educational equity consultant. Her research, which focuses on racial socialization and multicultural education, employs visual elicitation methodologies. She received her BA from Columbia University and her Doctorate from Harvard University. She is currently teaching at Brooklyn College.
Mark Dion was born in New Bedford, MA, in 1961. He received a BFA (1986) and an honorary doctorate (2003) from the University of Hartford, School of Art, CT. Dion’s work examines the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world. Appropriating archaeological and other scientific methods of collecting, ordering, and exhibiting objects, Dion creates works that question the distinctions between “objective” (“rational”) scientific methods and “subjective” (“irrational”) influences.
President, Louise Eliasof Fine Art, Inc.
Louise Eliasof graduated with a degree in Art History from Smith College and studied at the Université de Paris IV, Sorbonne. She has worked as a Director at the André Emmerich Gallery in New York and a Vice President and Specialist in Modern and Contemporary Art at the Citigroup Private Bank Art Advisory Service, consulting with clients on building their personal art collections. Currently, Louise is as an independent art advisor to several private collectors.
Having always believed that Art and Science are fabulously interconnected, Tricia Fitzpatrick loves to incorporate contemporary art into her high school Science classes and works to bring science into the arts. With her colleague and fellow ART21 Educator, Don Ball, she has travelled extensively with Science and Visual Arts students on interdisciplinary field trips throughout Latin America. Environmental stewardship is another of her passions as is the great outdoors. She is grateful to ART21 Educators for taking a risk on a Canadian Science teacher!
LaToya Ruby Frazier (born 1982, Braddock, PA) received her BFA in applied media arts from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania (2004) and her MFA in art photography from Syracuse University (2007). She also studied under the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program (2010-2011) and was the Guna S. Mundheim Fellow for visual arts at the American Academy in Berlin (2013-2014). In 2014, Frazier accepted the Assistant Professor of Photography position at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has previously held academic and curatorial positions at Yale University School of Art, Rutgers University, and Syracuse University.
Joe Fusaro is an exhibiting artist and educator, and has served as the Visual Arts Chair for the Nyack Public Schools since 2003. Fusaro is currently an adjunct instructor for New York University’s Graduate Program in Art and Arts Professions, certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, and has led staff development workshops in contemporary art education for universities, museums, and other cultural institutions across the U.S.
Jethro Gillespie has taught high school art in Utah for five years, and before that taught art at a junior high school for two years. He is currently a PhD Candidate in Art Education at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. His research interests examine the possibilities and effects of remaking an Art Foundations high school curriculum.
Jessica Hamlin joined ART21 in 2002 as the first Director of Education. She co-authored the book, Art as History, History as Art: Contemporary Art in the History Classroom (Routledge, 2009) and also serves as a Co-Director of the Art + Education Programs at New York University where she completed her MA in Art Education.
Oliver Herring lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received a BFA from the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford, England and an MFA from Hunter College, New York. Herring’s idiosyncratic artistic practice utilizes various methods to create an intimate space in which disparate individuals come together to create activities and repetitive gestures that consider personal relationships, beauty, and social justice.
Trained in music and visual arts, Lois Hetland taught elementary and middle school students for 17 years. She now teaches curriculum, studio-practice-while-teaching, and a travel course to India exploring art-science connections. Recently, she facilitated the Studio Thinking Network (2013-14), an online conversation among artist-educators; Chaired the Council for Policy Studies in Art Education; conducted a college-wide assessment initiative at MassArt (2009–2013); and served as Consulting Evaluator for ART21 Educators (2010–2012).
As the Chairman of Education for the largest museum in the western hemisphere, Sandra Jackson-Dumont is responsible for the vision and management of education and public programs encompassing a range of educational experiences and live arts performances designed for a diverse cross-section of audiences. She was formerly the Deputy Director for Education + Public Programs/Adjunct Curator, Modern & Contemporary Art Department at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM). Prior to her appointment at SAM, Jackson-Dumont worked at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among other cultural organizations.
Dr. Jerry James oversees instructional programs and research initiatives at The Center for Arts Education. With a background in painting and music, the former MCA recording artist has been a lecturer at MoMA, an international teaching artist at The Lincoln Center Institute, and a public school art teacher. He is currently an education professor at The School for Visual Arts.
Nick Kozak was born in the USA. He attended SUNY New Paltz, where he studied Art History and Art Education. Later, he completed a MA in Art Education at NYU. He currently lives in Brooklyn, NY with his wife, cat, and growing collection of comic books. He often cooks dinners for people in his home. Also, he makes art.
Cathleen Lewis is the Vice President of Education and Public Programs and oversees all programs and incentives developed by the Education Department at MAD, including those targeting school, youth, family and adult audiences. During her tenure at MAD, Lewis founded the Arts Access and Arts Reach school programs, which target underserved communities, and broaden MAD’s reach and capacity to serve diverse audiences. Previously, Lewis has held various positions at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Drawing Center. She holds an M.F.A from the School of Visual Arts and a B.S. from Skidmore College, and has attended the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program. Lewis’s artwork has been exhibited nationally in both museum and gallery exhibitions, and has been reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, Flash Art, and other publications.
Mary Mattingly is an artist based in New York. In 2014, she launched WetLand, a floating ecosystem and living space on the Delaware River, and in 2012, began the Flock House Project: three spherical living-systems that were choreographed through New York City’s five boroughs. Mattingly also founded the Waterpod Project, a barge-based public space containing an autonomous habitat that migrated through New York’s waterways.
Zipp (from the Bible, Zipporiah means “little bird”) Mills returned to PS261 in Brooklyn after serving as assistant principal at PS 59 in Bedford-Stuyvesant for two years. Ms. Mills was born and raised in East New York. She decided to become a teacher when she was in the eleventh grade at Thomas Jefferson High School and student-taught at a daycare facility. Before coming to PS261 in 2000 as an intervention teacher, Ms. Mills worked for 16 years at PS 273 in Brooklyn, teaching second, third, and sixth grades, and special education.
Dillon Paul is an artist and art educator. She received her MFA in 2003 from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston where her background as a dancer transitioned into a performance art and media practice. Now in her eighth year as a Media Arts teacher at The Flushing International High School, she offers recently immigrated students manual and digital tools for the expression of their personal experience, social, and political ideas. She is also an Adjunct Professor for the Art Education program at NYU.
Paul Pfeiffer was born in Honolulu, HI but spent most of his childhood in the Philippines. Pfeiffer relocated to New York in 1990, where he attended Hunter College and the Whitney Independent Study Program. Pfeiffer’s groundbreaking work in video, sculpture, and photography uses recent computer technologies to dissect the role that mass media plays in shaping consciousness.
Eric G. Pryor has provided exceptional leadership and zealous advocacy for nonprofit arts organizations for more than 15 years. Prior to joining CAE, Mr. Pryor was the Executive Director of the New Jersey State Museum. He holds an MFA in painting from the Tyler School of Arts at Temple University, and his work has been featured in many venues, including in the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority collection of public art.
As an educator, community organizer, and multi-media artist, Yvette Ramirez is inspired by the arts as a social agent that can build and empower communities as well as bring about transformative justice and healing.
As coordinator of Visual Arts for the New York City Department of Education, Karen Rosner supervises city-wide professional learning for visual arts educators, the annual exhibition of student artwork at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, curriculum development and the development and administration of the Commencement Examination in Visual Arts. Karen is also a volunteer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a Trustee of the School Art League, and an adjunct professor at Fordham University. She has an MA in Art History.
Arlene Shechet is a sculptor living and working in New York City and upstate New York. A major, critically acclaimed 20-year survey of the artist’s work, “All At Once,” which the New York Times called “some of the most imaginative American sculpture of the past 20 years, and some of the most radically personal,” was on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 2015 and was accompanied by an exhibition catalogue. Additionally in 2015, Greg Miller published a book that focuses on Shechet’s porcelain work at the Meissen manufactory in Berlin. Her work is included in many distinguished public and private collections, including the the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, and the National Gallery.
Jose Serrano McClain’s practice revolves around the economics of the creative spirit. As the Community Organizer for the Queens Museum, Jose uses cultural strategies to develop community partnerships that creatively address a range of complex urban issues in the multifaceted neighborhoods of Queens, among them immigrant civic integration, sustainable development, and public space equity. As Program Manager for Corona Studio, the first artist residency program dedicated to a NYC neighborhood, Jose has played an important role in a diverse portfolio of special projects for the Museum, including Immigrant Movement International, Corona Plaza, Los Angeles Poverty Department’s residency, Social Practice Queens, and the World’s Park.
Jack Watson has taught all levels of high school visual art and art history since 2005, with a special focus on two-dimensional applications (painting, drawing, and printmaking) and contemporary approaches to the studio process. A National Board Certified teacher, he completed an MA in Art Education from Ohio State University and has been an ART21 Educator since 2011.

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