Once again it’s time to introduce a new cohort of Art21 Educators who will be attending this summer’s institute and working with the Art21 learning community during the 2019-2020 school year. We are very excited to have this wonderful group joining us in New York City from July 8-13 as our ninth new cohort! To receive updates about our education initiatives, please subscribe to the monthly Art21 Educators newsletter, and watch this film for a look into the Summer Institute energy.

Let’s introduce the new Art21 Educators:

Lisa Becker teaches Studio Art and Media Arts at John Marshall High School in Rochester, Minnesota, a diverse community where students speak over eighty known languages. The wide range of artists featured by Art21 has inspired her students to create art about who they are. Becker has also collaborated with teachers and students in Nigeria, Turkey, and Australia, learning through meaningful art making, exchanging student work, and comparing methods of creating.

Jennifer Bockerman has taught across grade levels, including college, in Nebraska, New York, and Missouri. She uses interdisciplinary themes as students explore relative topics, media, and visual communication through scaffolded metacognitive thinking strategies. One of her goals is to create a theme-based curriculum in her school.

tobacco brown is a social impact artist based in New York City. A digital storyteller, writer and environmental advocate, brown has created storytelling murals, installations, gardens for sculpture and public art, and international community engagement projects that focus on reciprocity, creating healthy and resilient communities.

Sarah Ceurvorst is an artist and educator who teaches at an all-girls school in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania called The Ellis School. In her classroom, contemporary artists act as role models for her young students and their exhibitions and portfolios serve as textbooks. She firmly believes that contemporary art can be used as a tool for addressing issues of difference and inequity with young children. 

Elizabeth Denneau is a 2D Visual Arts teacher at Marana High School in Tucson, AZ. Her focus as an educator is to utilize the methods of contemporary art making to foster critical thinking and social justice in her classroom, as well as connecting students with opportunities for artistic success in their rural communities and beyond.

Kayleigh Gillies is a New Orleans-based artist and educator. She teaches elementary-level studio art at Isidore Newman School and collaborates with teachers to develop projects that are interdisciplinary, connecting art-making and academics through creative problem solving practices. Gillies often invites visiting artists into the art classroom to provide an opportunity for students to engage in current methods, concepts, and themes being explored in the New Orleans art community.

Mary Goldthwaite-Gagne is an artist, educator, and community organizer who lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. She is the Visual and Performing Arts Department Leader at ConVal High School where she has taught since 2007. In 2008, Goldthwaite-Gagne and her husband, Eric, founded The Glass Museum, a nonprofit art and music event space.

Kate Jellinghaus is an artist and educator who teaches ceramics and sculpture at Westwood High School in Boston. Jellinghaus also serves on the board of Artistic Noise, a visual arts and entrepreneurship program that serves incarcerated and court-involved youth. As a teacher, she is interested in helping young people envision themselves as artists. 

Sarah Kolker is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and Moore College of Art. She has studied health and wellness practices in Jamaica, the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City. Kolker currently teaches with Mural Arts in Philadelphia, also her hometown, which is the nation’s largest public art program that engages the community to ignite change through mural-making.

Andrea Mancuso is an artist, curator, and educator living in Buffalo, New York. She’s been teaching high-school for twenty years at Nichols School, and serves as their Department Chair. Mancuso is also a part of the multimedia art collective, virocode.

Jennie Maydew is an artist and educator in Queens, New York. In 2016, she was awarded the Windgate Fellowship as an emerging craft artist and is currently a youth educator at Achievement First Bushwick Middle School, BRIC, and the Textile Arts Center.

Birra-li Ward is an arts educator teaching at Woodleigh School, Victoria, Australia. Working with students 12-18 years of age in Visual Arts and Studio Arts, Ward has been the recipient of two separate scholarships to study at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. She uses her arts practice to engage with advocacy groups and uplift voices from marginalized communities. 

There you have it, folks, our ninth cohort of Art21 Educators! Please join us in welcoming them and wishing everyone all the best in their program year.