Keynote Speakers

Injeong Yoon-Ramirez

Friday, November 4 |
9am PST

gloria j. wilson

Friday, November 4 |
9am PST

lydia see

Saturday, November 5 |
9am PST

Elizabeth Denneau

Saturday, November 5 |
3:45pm PST

Anupam Singh

Anupam Singh (he/him) is a social practice artist and educator, from Mumbai, India. He is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Art and Visual Culture Education program at the University of Arizona. His art practice is grounded in various community contexts, fostering distributed authorship while his teaching practice explores participatory culturally sustainable approaches.

Betsy Kryeziu

Betsy Kryeziu (she/her) graduated with her B.F.A. in Art Education from the University of Arkansas. She has since taught for Springdale Public Schools in Springdale Arkansas. She has spent time teaching in elementary, junior high, and presently high school. Kryeziu is passionate about advocating for art educators and programs.

Devan Marin

Devan Marín (they/them) is an art educator from Oracle, Arizona. They received both their MA and BFA in Art and Visual Culture Education from The University of Arizona. They have worked at several art museums in the Tucson area, and currently serve as an adjunct faculty member at Pima Community College and an educator for MOCA Tucson’s Satellite program.

Elizabeth Gaxiola

Elizabeth Gaxiola (she/her/ella) is a Latina interdisciplinary scholar raised in the US-Mexico border. She is a doctoral candidate in the UA Teaching, Learning, and Sociocultural Studies Department. Her focus is in Social Justice & Diversity, as well as, Immigration and Education. Her minor is in Mexican American Studies with a focus on borderland studies.

Flavia Zuñiga-West

Flavia Zuñiga-West (she/her) is the founder of Adding Voices. She is an artist, art educator and consultant who works full time as a Middle School Visual Arts Teacher at Harvard-Westlake Middle School on Tongva land (what is known as Los Angeles). She holds her MA in Museum Studies from New York University and her BFA in Fiber and Material Studies from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Flavia is the recipient of the 2022 National Art Education Association’s Committee of Multiethnic Affairs In Service Teacher Award and the 2022 National Art Education Association’s Independent School Art Teacher of the Year Award.

Giramata Icyeza

Giramata is a community organizer, artist, Ph.D. Candidate in the department of Gender and Women Studies with a minor in African and African Diaspora Studies & Research Associate for iLGBTS. Their work, rooted in Black feminist traditions of otherworld making, sits in the fields of Black feminist Studies, Black visual culture and critical trauma studies. Their research interests are interrogating Black looking practices and analyzing the ways in which playing with time offers new Black feminist reading practices beyond images rooted in colonialism and slavery.

Harrison Orr

Harrison Orr (he/him) is the Education Manager at MOCA Tucson, as well as a visual artist, educator, and researcher. He earned a BFA in Media Arts in 2012 and an MA in Art & Visual Culture Education in 2019 at The University of Arizona.

Hayoung You

Hayoung You (she/her) is a Ph.D. Candidate in art education at Seoul National University. She has worked as a public elementary school teacher in Korea since 2016. She is also a ceramic artist and has exhibited her work in many shows. In addition, she was a visiting scholar at the University of Arizona during the 2019-2020 academic year.

Heather Kaplan

Dr. Heather Kaplan (she/her) is an artist, educator, and researcher who studies artmaking and early childhood art education. She is interested in play, materiality, community, contemporary artmaking practices, and storytelling. Theoretical investigations of epistemology and ontology prevail as reiterative themes in her writing, research, and pedagogical and artistic practice.

Hilary F. Douglas

Hillary Douglas (she/her) earned her BFA in Community Art Education from Massachusetts College of Art in 2006 and her MA in Art and Visual Culture Education from The University of Arizona in 2015. She is a 3rd year student in the AVCE doctoral program. Hillary holds state teaching licensures in Massachusetts, New Mexico, Arizona, and has 17 years of experience teaching art internationally in school, museum, and community settings. She currently serves as a Visual Art Integration Specialist at Vesey Elementary School with the Opening Minds through the Arts (OMA) program at Tucson Unified School District (TUSD).

Hillary’s research explores the connections between art integration and Social and Emotional Learning in K-12 public education settings.

Hunter M. Claypath

Hunter Claypatch (he/him/él) recently completed his PhD at Binghamton University. He is an archaeologist who specializes in precolonial ceramic production from northern Sonora. Claypatch is particularly interested in community-based archaeological approaches and using ceramic motifs as a proxy for reconstructing cultural interactions.

Jenna S. Green

Jenna Green (she/her) is currently a PhD student in Art & Visual Culture Education at the University of Arizona. Her research interests include art museum education and contemplative teaching practices (mindfulness, empathy, art as therapy, etc.). She is inspired by and advocates for the social, emotional, and mental impacts of art on well-being.

Juanita Sandoval

Juanita Sandoval (she/her/ella) is a third year PhD student in the Teaching Learning and Sociocultural Studies Department at the University of Arizona. She is interested in the intersections between teacher preparation programs and arts based teaching methods, specifically to guide educators when working with diverse linguistic and cultural communities.

Leah Ruth Marshquist

Leah Marshquist (she/her) holds a BFA and MAT from the Rhode Island School of Design and has worked as a public school art and design teacher for the last 18 years. She is also writing a book and has a YouTube channel and blog called, The Domestic Feminist.

Ling-Yu Chou

Ling-yu Chou (she/her) is a self-driven and motivated entrepreneur with success in art education through her art gallery and art studio.
She strives to plant deep roots in the development of community art and encourage a cultural ethos in every corner of our pluralistic society that arouses people’s enthusiasm for art. She is experienced in all aspects of art development, including curation, education and administration and has more than eight years qualified teaching experience in school, lecturing for in-service teacher education in Taiwan and operating an educational project in London.

Maria Cells

Maria Cells (she/her) is a Master’s student in the Art and Visual Culture Education Program at the University of Arizona. She is the Art Curriculum Specialist in the UA Community and School Garden Program where she focuses on classroom instruction that brings the arts and sciences together for more holistic learning in K-12 educational garden setting. She was born in Guatemala, raised in Los Angeles, and currently lives in Tucson.

Nicole Antebi

Nicole Antebi (she/her) is an animator/filmmaker who makes things that move, loop, and sometimes hold. She came of age on the northwest bank of the Rio Grande/Río Bravo on the El Paso/Juárez border. The importance of movement as it concerns the dignity of people and rivers was a formative part of her childhood and the foundation of the work she does today.

She is an assistant professor of Illustration and Animation at The University of Arizona and previously taught at CUNY Queens College, SUNY Albany, and in 2019 she was a visiting professor at la Universidad de las Américas, Puebla, Mexico.

Norma V. Iglesias-Prieto

Dr. Norma Iglesias Prieto (she/her) is a transborder scholar with an interdisciplinary education (B.A. in social anthropology, M.A. in communications, and Ph.D. in sociology). She is co-founder of El Colegio de la Frontera Norte (Tijuana; 1982) and has 37 years of academic experience in cultural studies on the U.S.-Mexico border, with emphases on identity, gender, art, and mass media (particularly cinema).

Her recent scholarship draws on creativity potential as a mechanism to resist oppression and express human dignity and role of the arts in the reconfiguration of the social fabric. She developed the concept of borderism in order to understand the different meanings of border experiences and practices.

Rachel Zollinger

Rachel Zollinger (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and PhD student in Art and Visual Culture Education at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on multispecies pedagogies, place-based learning, and multidisciplinary approaches to children’s ecological literacy and agency through art and science.

Ran (Cathy) Qi

Ran Qi (Cathy) is a fifth-year Ph.D. student. Her research interests and experience include museum education, student engagement in the online setting, global art communication, and social justice. She has graphic design background and interned with various art museums, and has one-year K-12 art teaching experiences. These experiences support her in her research and teaching in many ways.

Richelle María Vargas

Richelle Maria (she/her/ella) is a Nicaraguan-U.S. American artist, bilingual art educator, and doctoral student. She teaches and learns with public high school students through a variety of art classes. Through arts-based research methods, she investigates the overlaps between critical forced migration studies, US public K-12 education, and English Language Learners.

Seoyeon Jenn Kim

Seoyeon Jenn Kim (she/her) is a 2nd year Ph.D student in the Art and Visual Culture Education program at the University of Arizona. Kim has diverse experiences working with K-12 and higher education students in both South Korea and the United States. Highly interested in autoethnography, social justice, visual literacy, media and visual culture, and storytelling narrative art, Kim pays close attention to personal narratives in order to understand and question the ever-changing surroundings and multiple identities with inclusion, diversity, equity, and access.

Sydney Streightiff

Sydney Streightiff (she/her) is a PhD student and oboist in the Applied Intercultural Arts Research Graduate Program at the University of Arizona. Her interests include using the arts as an equitable way to promote health and wellness and aging. Her current work focuses on layering creative practices over awe walking.

Zoila A. Caamaño-Pumarol

Zoila A. Caamaño Pumarol (she/her), was born in the Dominican Republic and grew up in Puerto Rico. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from the Interamerican University of Puerto Rico, a Master of Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a Master of Arts in Art Education from the University of New Mexico.