ARTIST | EDUCATOR | LEADER
MY SERVICES
I am a practicing artist, arts educator and arts administrator with more than twenty years of commitment to individual and community empowerment through creative public programs. With my teaching lens firmly focused on culturally-responsive pedagogy and content, I approach my teaching practice through the synthesis of material instruction, critical thinking, research, and rigorous visual perception. I offer custom-designed lectures, workshops, courses, facilitated conversations and rituals.
Artistic and educational collaboration is the essence of my teaching and leadership work: deep listening, reflecting back, synthesizing ideas, generating possibilities, and bringing all of my experience as an artist, teacher, and/or administrator, and as a woman of color, to address complex, creative challenges.
TEACHING ARTIST
I taught at the university level for over six years before being recruited to found New Mexico School for the Arts, a residential charter high school in Santa Fe dedicated to pre-professional arts training. NMSA was my first foray into K-12 teaching. Since 2019, I've been working in arts education administration although I continue to deliver workshops and artist lectures to students and teachers alike.
Recent workshops include:
-
Fierce Foundations: Centering the Work of Women of Color, a drawing workshop that centers contemporary artwork by women of color as a starting point for participants to create and explore images of complex and ambiguous self-identities.
-
Family Codex/Códice Familiar, provides an historical introduction to the Pre-Columbian tradition of codices—books that record history, story, belief systems and ritual—followed by a drawing/collage activity in which participants create a codex.
-
Profound Possibilities: Creative Practice as Engaged Pedagogy is an opportunity for teachers and students to name—and make art about—their identity and experiences (co-created and presented with Loretta Trujillo).
-
Reimagining Papel Picado is a brief dive into historical and contemporary cut paper craft, followed by a hands-on workshop in which participants learn the fundamentals of creating a modern version of papel picado.
PROGRAM DEVELOPMENT & FACILITATION
I help both established and start-up organizations design, manage, and/or build their programs, strategize and implement growth or reorganization, and cultivate talent. I’m highly skilled in curriculum writing and design. Although I have long specialized in art education programming, more recently I’m interested in supporting the careers of women of color working in the art and culture sector by providing mentorship and coaching on how to navigate systems of power in organizations and institutions that historically (and often unintentionally) perpetuate oppressive models of leadership and learning.