CAC 2020 Symposium

Ayelet Danielle Aldouby is a public art and social practice curator working at the intersection of art, education and wellness. She serves as a curatorial consultant at Residency Unlimited, NYC and was the founding member and lead curator for IDEAS xLab cultivating artists as agents of change around the US. Aldouby has curated with the International Artists’ Museum “Poles Apart, Poles Together” and “Divine In Tent” projects at the 51st & 52nd Venice Biennales and Documenta in Kassel, Germany.  She served as consultant and public art curator for “Re:Construction” public art projects, commissioned by Alliance for Downtown NY and most recently curated public video art in Times Square with ZAZ10. She is pursuing her doctorate in Art Education at Teachers College, Columbia University and instructs socially engaged art and community engagement focused on sustainability. Her recent publication focused on community engagement was Seeing the Unseen: A Coming of Age Story Inspired by Soap and Buttons appeared in Trends - The Journal of the Texas Art Education Association. 

Zenzele Z. Johnson is the Education Coordinator at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Zenzele manages the Teen Curators Program where high school students learn about art history and curatorial studies through art-making, archival research and at the end of the program year curate an exhibition. Prior to joining the Schomburg Center she served as a media literacy and education advocate through the LAMP (Learning About Media Project). She is a former Innovative Cultural Equity Fellow of the Caribbean Cultural Center for African Diaspora Institute where she supported efforts to educate millions of New Yorkers about their right to access art and culture through social action.

Dr. Judith Burton is Professor and Director of Art & Art Education at Columbia University Teachers College. Before that she was Chair of Art Education at Boston University and taught at the Massachusetts College of Art. Burton received her Ed. D. from Harvard University in 1980. Her research focuses on the artistic-aesthetic development of children, adolescents and young adults and the implications this has for teaching and learning and the culture in general. In 1995 she co-founded the Center for Research in Arts Education at Teachers College, and in 1996 founded the Heritage School – a comprehensive high school featuring the arts – located in Harlem, NYC. Her book Conversations in Art: The Dialectics of Teaching and Learning co-edited with Dr. Mary Hafeli was published in 2012. She is the author of numerous articles and chapters and currently has two books in the process of publication. She received the Manuel Barkan Award for excellence in research writing, the Lowenfeld Award for lifetime achievement in art education from NAEA and the Ziegfeld Award for services to international art education from INSEA. Dr. Burton is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts in Great Britain, a Distinguished Fellow of the NAEA, and serves as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts Beijing, and the South China Normal University, Guangzhou.  She was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Beaconhouse University, Lahore, Pakistan. She is a Trustee of the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD, USA and a former Trustee of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine, USA. She is the NAEA Eisner Lifetime Achievement honoree for 2015, in recognition of her services to the profession both nationally and globally.

Jamie Bennett is the Executive Director of ArtPlace America, a ten-year fund that supports artists working as allies in equitable community development. ArtPlace has invested over $100 million to support projects in rural, suburban, tribal, and urban communities of all sizes across the United States, as well as in sharing knowledge from that work in ways that are both useful and actually used by practitioners. ArtPlace convenes and connects people who are committed to this work in order to help build a strong and ongoing field of practice.Previously, Jamie was Chief of Staff and Director of Public Affairs at the National Endowment for the Arts, where he worked on the national rollouts of the "Our Town" grant program and of partnerships with the US Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development.Before the NEA, Jamie was Chief of Staff at the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs,where he worked on partnerships with the NYC Departments for the Aging, of Education, and of Youth and Community Development. Jamie has also provided strategic counsel at the Agnes Gund Foundation, served as chief of staff to the President of Columbia University, and worked in fundraising at The Museum of Modern Art, the New York Philharmonic, and Columbia College. He currently lives, works, worships, and plays in Brooklyn, NY,and has been sober since 2009.

Dr. Ansley T. Erickson is a historian who focuses on educational inequality and urban and metropolitan history. Her first book, Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits (University of Chicago Press, 2016) tells the story of persistent inequality in Nashville, Tennessee's metropolitan school district during periods of segregation and desegregation. Her writing has appeared in the American Journal of Education, History of Education Quarterly, Journal of Urban History, and Teachers College Record, as well as in Dissent and Chalkbeat. In fall 2017, she was a Scholar in Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library. With Professor Ernest Morrell of Notre Dame, Erickson leads the Harlem Education History Project, a collaborative investigation into the history of education in 20th century Harlem. The project includes an edited volume under contract with Columbia University Press, a digital history project, and youth participatory history program. Erickson was a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow in 2011-2013, and has held research fellowships from the Spencer Foundation and the Eisenhower Institute among others. She currently serves on the editorial board of the History of Education Quarterly and Theory and Research in Education, and was chair of the History of Education Society Outstanding Book Prize committee in 2015-16. Earlier in her career, Erickson taught history and conducted ethnographic research in New York City schools and worked at two national education organizations. She also has experience in historical documentary film and public history consulting. 

Delicia Forbes has been committed to the development of arts, culture and education since first experiencing the transformative power of the arts as a youth activist involved in the anti-apartheid struggle in Cape Town, South Africa in the 1980’s. She has worked in Cape Town and London,  with and in communities utilizing the arts to fight injustice, inequality, inequity and exclusion. She has designed and curated groundbreaking arts programs and initiatives aimed at building resilient, cohesive and inclusive communities.  

Christine Licata (Executive Director of NLE) joins the NLE team with a wealth of experience in strategic leadership and social justice arts and education initiatives with artist-led, diverse, intergenerational local engagement at its core. A staunch artist advocate and community builder, her focus will be to expand upon NLE’s transformational impact and contributions towards equitable social and cultural advancement. She has served as a Director of Community & Public Programs at The Bronx Museum, Director of Performing and Visual Arts for Casita Maria Center for Arts and Education, Associate Director of Visual Arts at the Boston Center for the Arts  and Associate Curator at Taller Boricua / Puerto Rican Workshop in Spanish Harlem. As an Art Writer and Critic, she has been published in numerous exhibition and artist catalogs as well as written for Artlog, Degree Critical, PERFORMA and Art on Paper. She has a BFA from Parsons The New School for Design and an MFA in Art Criticism and Writing from the School of Visual Arts.

Che Sabalja’s multifaceted career in the arts arena as a Public School Art Teacher, Researcher, Artist/Performer, Museum Art Educator, Curator, Museum Director and Gallery Manager, has influenced her to pursue an Ed.D. in Art Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her teaching and research interests explore the dynamics between the brain, empathetic learning, and collaborative art making. Recent discoveries in neuroscience have continued to reshape

her understanding of how the arts affect learning and awaken a deeper interpretation of its evolutionary process. As an artist/educator, she is committed to encouraging students to view art as an evolving body of knowledge and visual vocabulary from which to derive meaning. Che's artistic pursuits seek to deconstruct the organizational thought processes in the brain involved with reflection, remembrance, and healing through the use of color and viscosity.

Ugo-Charles Onyewuchi is the co-founder of Nze-Ugo Education Foundation, which partners with schools and clinics in rural Nigeria to design and organize community workshop programs on health and traditional arts education. Raised in between two cultures, his artistic practice focuses on uncovering private languages, materials, and systems that aid in the construction of cross-cultural meanings and experiences.

Ayishah Irvin is a Harlem native with strong community ties in the neighborhood. She was educated in a Harlem school, went away to college to get a BA with a major in English and a minor in Mass Communication and then returned to Harlem to begin her career as a teacher before realizing her passion was helping parents and children on a different level.  For the past 10 years she has been a member of the Community Education District Council where she has been the Recording Secretary and the Treasurer. For the last two years she has served on the PTA board at Teachers College Community School (TCCS) and is currently serving as the TCCS co- president. Ayishah has also served as the class parent of the 8th grade for the last 4 years and is a Community activist . Her vision is for students to experience more cross cultural and race conversations in the classroom and integrate their lived experience into the curriculum in more experiential ways.

James currently serves as Director of Social Impact Programs at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute. Horton is responsible for managing a portfolio of programs that works to provide high quality, transformative arts experiences to young people in NYC as well as populations of young people and adults whose lives have been impacted by the justice system. James has over two decades of experience in creative youth development, arts education and community engagement. Prior to joining Carnegie Hall James served as the Director of Learning and Leadership Development for the National Guild for Community Arts Education where he oversaw the National Conference for Community Arts Education, directed the Guild’s national arts educator leadership initiatives and managed a host of other online professional development programs and regional partnerships. During James’s tenure at the Guild, he also spearheaded the organization’s DEI efforts and was quintessential in recruiting and curating the most diverse constituency of arts educators the organization has ever served in its 81 year history. James started his career in the world of arts education at The Harlem Children’s Zone as a performing arts and video teaching artist, working with young people to develop their voices through film and theatre. While at HCZ, Horton also served as a Program Director for the Zone’s Employment & Technology Center, where he developed the Technology & Arts (TechnoArts) learning initiatives to serve Harlem youth. James studied theater at Southern University in Baton Rouge, LA and is a graduate of Columbia University's Institute for Not-For-Profit Management.

Marit Dewhurst is the Director of Art Education and Associate Professor of Art and Museum Education at The City College of New York. She has worked as an arts educator and program director in multiple arts contexts including community centers, museums, juvenile detention centers, and international development projects. Her research and teaching interests include social justice education, community-based art, anti-racist education, youth empowerment, and the role of the arts in community development. In addition to multiple journal articles and chapters, her first book, Social Justice Art: A framework for activist art pedagogy  highlights young activist artists. Her second book, Teachers Bridging Difference: Exploring identity through art describes how to use art as a tool to connect people across different sociocultural identities. She is currently working on a book with Keonna Hendrick on anti-racist education in museums.

Deidre B. Flowers earned her PhD from Columbia University in 2017. Her work centers on black women in education. Dr. Flowers’ research interests include women in education, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, women’s higher education, higher education leadership, and student protest and activism. Her dissertation, “Education in Action: The Work of Bennett College for Women 1930 – 1960,” argues that Bennett College intentionally sought to educate socially conscious and civically engaged citizens during the twentieth century who worked to improve African Americans’ quality of life domestically and abroad. Dr. Flowers is also a graduate of Hampton University and Syracuse University, and a life- long Harlem resident.

Pablo Helguera  Director of Adult and Academic programs at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Helguera is a New York based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, socially engaged art and performance. His work as an educator reflects on issues of interpretation, dialogue, and the role of contemporary culture in a global reality. Helguera has exhibited or performed at venues such as ICA and MFA Boston; Manifesta 11 (2016) 8th and 11th Havana Biennial, PERFORMA 05 and 11, MoMA P.S.1, New York; Brooklyn Museum; Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum; The Bronx Museum, and Sculpture Center, amongst many others. In 2008 he was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship and also was the recipient of a 2005 Creative Capital Grant. In 2011 he was named winner of the International Award of Participatory Art of the Region Emilia-Romagna in Italy. He has also received the Franklin Furnace and Art Matters grants. Helguera has worked since 1991 in a variety of contemporary art museums, most recently as head of public programs at the Education department of the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1998-2005). In 2010 he was appointed pedagogical curator of the 8th Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil. He is represented by Kent Fine Art in New York. He is the author of around 20 books, most recently Art Scenes (2012), Education for Socially Engaged Art (2011), The Parable Conference (2014) and An Atlas of Commonplaces (2015).

The Founder of Barefoot Artists, Yeh is an internationally celebrated artist whose work has taken her to communities throughout the world. As founder and executive director of the Village of Arts and Humanities in North Philadelphia from 1986 to 2004, she helped create a national model of community building through the arts. In 2002, Yeh founded Barefoot Artists, Inc., in order to bring the transformative power of art to impoverished communities around the globe through participator, multifaceted projects that foster community empowerment, improve the physical environment, promote economic development and preserve indigenous art and culture. In addition to the United States, she has carried out projects in many countries including Kenya, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Rwanda, China, Taiwan, Ecuador, Syria, Republic of Georgia, Haiti, and Palestine. Her life and work were the subject of the feature length documentary The Barefoot Artist.

Max Frieder is the Co-founder and Co-executive director of the international community-based public arts organization Artolution. He is a public artist, art educator and community arts scholar from Denver, Colorado who is based out of New York City. He graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with honors and a degree in Painting and received his Education Masters (Ed.M) in “Community Arts” in Art and Art Education from the Teachers College, Columbia University where he teaches courses and is building a body of research through his Education Doctorate (Ed.D). He has worked with hundreds of communities in different contexts across the Middle East, Latin America, Australasia, Europe, North America and Asia.

His work ranges from community building in refugee camps, art education in emergencies, hospital workshops, abuse and addiction support through art, trauma relief, reconciliation and conflict resolution. He is a trans-disciplinary artist, sculptor, puppeteer and facilitates collaborative mural programs that address critical local issues. He created the “Foundstrument Soundstrument Project”, building large-scale interactive percussive sculptures out of trash and recycled materials around the world. His projects have taken him from Palestine and Israel to refugee camps in Jordan, Turkey, Greece, France and has worked with traumatized communities in India, New Zealand, Australia, Dominican Republic, Colombia, Cuba, Peru, Mexico, Canada and throughout the United States. He has collaborated with globally renowned artists including Vik Muniz and JR in the favelas of Brazil. He started the first ongoing public arts program for Rohingya artists in the largest refugee camp in the world, in Bangladesh on the border of Myanmar. He is a published author in “ Art Making with Refugees and Survivors: Transformative Responses to trauma after Natural Disasters, War and Other Crises”, as well as publishing with Global Citizen. For his global work, he was awarded the International Crisis Award from World of Children and UNICEF in 2018. His ranging work focuses on cultivating ongoing programs by educating local artists globally on how to transform communities through public engagement, creative facilitation and inspired participation as the next phase in the history of the arts.