Current Members
Ann Holt, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Art Education at the Pennsylvania State University, at University Park, PA (USA) and Co-Editor in Chief of the journal Arts Culture & Development. She serves as an advisor to Arts Action Group, an international community-based collective committed to facilitating arts initiatives with children and youth in conflict-affected environments. Her research, teaching and writing encompasses social justice issues involving arts and human development and research on and with archives to broaden understanding about engaging art education archival records. Her art-making encompasses mixed media materials responding to her life experience, research, and teaching. Holt holds a B.F.A. in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute and an M.A. in art education from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. She completed her doctoral work in art education with a minor in women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Penn State University. Her dissertation research explored a feminist transdisciplinary orientation to the Judy Chicago Art Education Collection and broadens understanding about engaging and encountering art education archival records.
Cindy Maguire, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Art & Design Education at Adelphi University and Co-Editor in Chief of the journal Arts Culture & Development. She also co-directs ArtsAction Group, a community-based collective of arts educators, art therapists, artist teachers, and educators committed to facilitating arts and education initiatives with young people in conflict-affected environments. Cindy is a member of the Teachers Without Borders Global Advisory board and has taught K-12 visual arts education in the Los Angeles City Schools. Her research interests include STEM to STEAM and the role of collaborative and socially engaged art in personal and social transformation. Maguire received her PhD in Art Education from New York University, MA in Art Education from California State University Long Beach, and her BAE in Art Education from the University of Kansas. Cindy is also an exhibiting artist and designs and produces socially-engaged art with communities.
Rob McCallum, Ph.D. is an Art and Design Education educator and the Director of Creative Art Start, an after-school and summer arts program for K-8 children and youth. McCallum is also Co-Director of ArtsAction Group and former Art Educator at the Allen-Stevenson School in New York City. Prior to coming the USA, McCallum was Head of the Department of Fine Art and then Dean of the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at the University of Johannesburg. As Dean he was involved in the transformation of the institution away from apartheid structures. McCallum received his PhD in Art Education from New York University, MA in Art Education from Ohio State University as a Fulbright Scholar, and BA Art from Cape Town University, South Africa. McCallum is also a practicing artist and has exhibited his work at numerous solo and group shows in South Africa including the Karen McKerron Gallery, Market Theatre Gallery, and the University of Durban-Westville Gallery. His work has been published in the Creative Arts Diary based in Cape Town and is in public collections including the Anglo American Foundation, Market Theatre Foundation, University of Durban-Westville Collection and Provident Fund Corporation in South Africa. His art has been reviewed in numerous publications and television media in South Africa. McCallum also designs and produces community-based collaborative art with children and youth in New York City as well as internationally.
Mohamed Sleiman Labat is a poet and a visual artist from the Sahrawi refugee camps southwest Algeria. He was born and raised there. He took his primary education in the camps before he moved to continue his studies abroad. After graduation from Batna University in English Literature, he went back to the camps to help support his family and community through art. He works with different art genres and mediums; he’s a photographer, a sculptor, a painter and an art facilitator. Coming from a desert culture, he’s familiar with a long tradition of oral arts of the indigenous Sahrawi poetry and stories and he likes to combine this with visual artistic mediums. Recently, he experimented with utilizing discarded materials to create sculptures. This experimentation led to creating MOTIF, an art studio in the middle of the desert. He now uses the studio to create art and facilitate art projects for others. Sleiman Labat is also collecting the oral history of the Sahrawi community in the camps through video and audio documentation. The growing archive of oral history is part of MOTIF Art Studio archival material. Co-author of “Settled Wanderers, the Poetry of Western Sahara” with Sam Berkson, the first collection of Sahrawi poems to be translated into English. He travels for exhibitions, art residencies and conferences about the Sahrawi art and culture in Europe and North Africa. https://www.motifartstudio.com/
Natalia Pilato is a community-based artist, educator, and scholar who’s work focuses on building the social capital of target communities through artistic processes. Her large scale national and international community-based mural projects have engaged thousands of intergenerational community members in both the design process and the painting of the murals. Natalia Pilato holds a Ph.D. in Art Education from the Pennsylvania State University. She attended her program as a Bunton Waller Graduate Fellow and has received numerous awards of recognition, which include: The Joy of Giving Something Award; Imagining America Scholarship; the Creative Achievement Award from the P.S.U College of Arts and Architecture; the Ingrid P. Holtzman Award; Brian Betzler Memorial Scholarship; Alumni Honors Award; the American Association of University Women Outstanding Achievement Award, and the Business and Professional Women Opportunity Grant. Currently Dr. Pilato lives in Norfolk VA and is an Assistant professor of Art Education and the Director of the Art Education Program at Old Dominion University.
Kim Berman is a Professor in Visual Art at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) and Executive Director of Artist Proof Studio (APS), a community-based printmaking centre in Newtown, Johannesburg which she co-founded APS with the late Nhlanhla Xaba in 1991. She received her B.F.A. from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1981 and her M.F.A. from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/ Tufts University, USA in 1989. She completed her PhD at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2009. She has lectured and exhibited widely in South Africa and internationally. She is committed to engaging arts for social change through her activism and teaching. Her book: Finding Voice: A visual approach to engaging change is published by the University of Michigan Press.
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=KiT2jeYAAAAJ&hl=en
Artist Proof Studio: http://www.artistproofstudio.co.za
Boitumelo Kembo is a Pretoria-based typographer, graphic designer, and art historian. She completed her National Diploma and B-Tech Graphic Design at the Vaal University of Technology in 2006 and 2008, respectively. She received her MA History of Art from the North West University in 2018. She is currently pursuing her PhD at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Boitumelo has lectured in numerous university contexts. Her research interests are Indigenous Knowledge and Writing Systems, African-orientated and decolonial aesthetics, typography, and Early African Art.
Danielle Smith graduated in Biochemistry, Mount Holyoke College, studied Arabic and received an MA Anthropology at Haifa University. Her involvement with the Saharawi refugee community began in 1991. She began speaking widely about the conflict at universities, the UN, the UK parliament, radio and TV. In 1993 and 1994, she taught English in the camps, learning the spoken Hassaniya dialect. She has two documentaries about the independence struggle, Song of Umm Dalaila and award-winning Beat of Distant Hearts:the art of revolution in Western Sahara and was invited to associate produce the 1998 BBC 2 Correspondent programme: A Forgotten War. Smith’s interest in the role of the arts in the Saharawi struggle led to the creation of Sandblast, in 2005 and to organise an arts and cultural festival on Western Sahara, in London, in 2007 which culminated with Sandtracks, the debut album of the camp- based Tiris band. Between 2010-14, Smith ran the Studio-Live project providing sound-engineering training and in 2015, she set up the Saharawi Artivism Fund to encourage youth to creatively engage with their local community for long-term positive change. In 2016 she launched the Desert Voicebox project in partnership with Ruth Travers, the creator of the Stave House method, and Dr. Violeta Ruano.
Dr. Ruano is a Music and Languages Education specialist with over a decade of experience in researching, teaching, project development and management. She has a PhD in Music Research, focusing on Saharawi music and resistance and a MMus in Ethnomusicology and an MA in English as a Second Language Education. Throughout her career, she has collaborated with international organisations such as the British Library, the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London), the British Forum for Ethnomusicology, and the Volkswagen Foundation. She has published about Saharawi music in numerous publications such as Transposition; Sahara Occidental: Conflit Oublie, Population en Mouvement; and Culture and Politics in the West Sahara (Mauritania, Mali, Western Sahara): Arts, Activism and the State in a Conflict Area (France), Memory, Power and Knowledge in African Music (Germany), the Journal of the International Library of African Music (South Africa), Songlines (UK) and more
Dr. Ruano has been working with Sandblast since 2011, charged with setting up the Desert Voicebox pilot in the camps. Between 2016 and 2017, she spent over 8 months there training the local teachers, teaching the first year of lessons, and overseeing development of the classroom and donations.
Sara Hommel has more than 20 years of experience in global development and humanitarian response programming for children and families. In her current role, Sara leads the global Healing and Education through the Arts (HEART) program and the broader Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) portfolio for the international programs department at Save the Children US. Prior to joining Save the Children, Sara spent 7 years at the Brookings Institution where she designed and managed research and advocacy on global education, health, and nutrition programs and policies for young children. Before her time at Brookings, she worked with several NGOs addressing the needs of children affected by conflict and poverty in multiple countries. She holds a BA in Sociology from St. Lawrence University, an MA in International Relations from Central European University, and is a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Education at the University of London. Her research interests focus on the impact of school based psychosocial support programming for children affected by multiple adversities. Sara is a classically trained musician and studied music, art, and drama therapy during both her undergraduate and postgraduate studies.
Dr. Girija Kaimal, (EdD, MA, ATR-BC) is Associate Professor in the PhD Program in Creative Arts Therapies at the Drexel University College of Nursing and Health Professions. In her Health, Arts, Learning and Evaluation (HALE) research lab, she examines physiological and psychological outcomes of creative visual self-expression. Girija currently leads studies examining arts-based approaches to health among cancer caregivers, active duty military service members and veterans (funded by the US Department of Defense and the National Endowment for the Arts) as well as creative expression in virtual reality (in collaboration with the International Arts+Mind Lab at John Hopkins University). In her scholarship, she works with traditional art media, indigenous art forms as well as digital technologies like virtual reality. She examines their role in psychosocial development including in international contexts. She has led longitudinal research studies examining arts-based approaches to school leadership development and teacher incentives, and, won national awards for her research. Girija is the President-Elect of the American Art Therapy Association and is also on the editorial board of several arts and heath journals. She is also a practicing visual artist. Her art explores the intersection of identity and representation of emotion. More details on her work are available at www.girijakaimal.com,http://girijakaimal.blogspot.com and http://drexel.edu/cnhp/research/research-areas/creative-arts-therapies/KaimalGirija/research/
‘Désirée Rochat, program director of the Observatoire des Communautés noires du Quebec, is a community educator and transdisciplinary scholar. She holds a PhD in Educational Studies from the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University. Guided by an integrative approach connecting historical research, community archival preservation and education, her work aims to document, theorize and transmit (hi)stories of Black communities’ activism. She develops collaborative projects bridging scholarly and community work and is involved in various initiatives for the preservation and promotion of Black community archives.
Emilija Mecelicaite is a Lithuania-based art therapist with an MA Art Therapy from the University of Hertfordshire. Emilija is a member of the European Federation of Art Therapy (EFAT) and the Lithuanian Art Therapist association. She has worked in a variety of contexts including a depression treatment centre, youth centres and schools over the past five years, offering individual and group art therapy sessions for children, adolescents and adults. In her person-centred practice, she focuses on creating safe spaces for others’ inner journey of expression and self-knowledge, as well as nurturing empathy and resilience. Emilija’s work is informed by her background in philosophy (The University of Glasgow), while also drawing on elements from intersectionality and neuroscience research to form a broad-based contemporary practice. In the past few years, she has developed a keen interest in ecology and environmental arts, which is explored through both her own art making and art therapy practice.
Janine Simpson holds an MA Art Therapy from the University of Hertfordshire. Janine has 10 years’ experience working with Looked After Children in a London based charity specialising in residential care and therapeutic engagement. In her consultancy role, Janine uses art therapy theory and practice to facilitate art-based reflective practice sessions for children’s workers and home managers. Passionate about mental health and wellbeing, Janine has two years’ experience as an art therapist in NHS adult community mental health services and later NHS forensic services. Janine believes in ‘wellbeing for all’ and promotes a collaborative, side by side approach when working with individuals, communities and organisations on a local and global scale. In her spare time these themes continue in her work as an abstract expressionist artist where intersubjective theories are explored visually.
Refki Gollopeni MFA received his degree from the University of Prishtina where he studied graphic design. He is Culture Coordinator in the Municipality of Therandës-Suharekës and the Director for Arts Education at the Fellbach-Haus Centre for Creative Education in Therandës-Suharekës, Kosovo. He also directs the International Art Colony, a part of the annual Festari and the Theranda-Suhareka Animation Film Festival (TAFF). His paintings are in numerous private and public collections and his paintings and graphic design work has been the recipient of numerous awards including the National Bank of Kosovo, which recognized his work around the 100th anniversary of the independence of Albania. He also designed the war victims memorial in his municipality as well as designed the emblem of the municipal Assembly of Therandës-Suharekës. A 2018 participant in the Global Institute for the Arts and Leadership, he is recognized as a Global Visionary Leader.
Alexia Sobrado founded BoBo GloBal in 2014 in a quest for authenticity, fair trade principles, sustainability, environmental and cultural awareness through the visibility, attribution and honoring of indigenous artistic heritage and craft. With her co-designer and partner, Felicia Lieto, the two women make annual trips to collaborate and partner with indigenous artisans in various regions of the world.
Alexia Sobrado, Owner/Designer, BoBo GloBal NYC LLC
Vida Sabbaghi, a cultural producer, is the founder and executive director of COPE NYC (Creative Opportunities Promoting Equality New York City). COPE NYC promotes social relations through art exhibits, symposiums, education, fashion shows, and community art projects. Sabbaghi is a consultant for NYC galleries; her curatorial projects include photography and film. She organized a three-day international art education conference and exhibit at Queens Museum and was their guest curator several times. Her expertise extends to traveling exhibits, including Overlap: Life Tapestries, and Repsychling. She also designs programming, workshops, and discussions, to accompany exhibits. She expanded COPE NYC’s reach with Artists in Residence projects in Brooklyn, Taiwan, and Germany. Vida, an editor and writer for art publications, coedited Bridging Communities through Socially Engaged Art, with Dr Alice J. Wexler, published by Routledge. Vida studied Industrial Design; Theory, Criticism, History of Art, Design, and Architecture; and Art & Design Education at Pratt Institute; she graduated with distinction. She received The Pratt Circle Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement and the Certificate of Excellence Award for Outstanding Merit in Graduate Art Education. Vida received the Art Advocate of the Year Award from NYCATA/UFT and the Edwin Ziegfeld Service Award from USSEA.
Karen Keifer-Boyd, Ph.D., is Professor of Art Education and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. She co-authored several books: Lobby Activism: Feminism(s)+Art Education; Including Difference ; InCITE, InSIGHT, InSITE; Engaging Visual Culture; co-edited Real-World Readings in Art Education: Things Your Professors Never Told You; and has numerous journal publications. Her research on transdisciplinary creativity, inclusion, feminist art pedagogy, visual culture, cyberart activism, transcultural dialogue, action research, and eco-social justice art education have been translated and published in Austria, Brazil, China, Columbia, Finland, Oman, and S. Korea. Co-founder and editor of Visual Culture & Gender, she received Fulbright Awards (Austria, 2012; Finland, 2006) and residencies (Austria, 2009; Uganda, 2010). She leads a curricula team on social justice art education, coordinates the Judy Chicago Art Education Collection, and serves as consultant to VSA, an international organization on arts and disability. She’s received National Art Education Association (NAEA) awards including the Eisner Lifetime Achievement Award (2020) and NAEA Distinguished Fellow Class of 2013, and served as the NAEA Women’s Caucus president, Coordinator of the Caucus of Social Theory in Art Education, Research Steering Committee for the Art Education Research Institute, Council for Policy Studies in Art Education, and 2012 Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Gender Studies at Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria.
Xinxin Guo is a social entrepreneur based in Boston, Massachusetts. She is the founder of China Arts Link (CAL), a nonprofit organization focusing on facilitating cultural exchange between the U.S. and China through conferences, exhibitions, and education programs. Guo was the founder and director of Beijing Studio Center, a founding partner of World Event Young Artists, a Cultural Olympic Event as part of the 2012 London Olympic Games. She was also a board member of ResArtis, a worldwide network of artists-in-residency programs. Guo taught at the Dalian University of Technology and the University of North Carolina. She has a BA in art history from Tsing University in Beijing and an MBA from Babson College in Boston.
Dr. Darden Bradshaw is Associate Professor of Art Education and Area Coordinator for Art Education in the Department of Art & Design at the University of Dayton. She holds both a PhD in Art History and Education and an MFA in Fiber Art from the University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ. Her scholarship focuses on art integration, empathy development through arts, visual journaling, and the training of preservice teachers. Dr. Bradshaw worked as an Arts Integration Specialist within the K-12 system in the Southwestern United States for six years and facilitated Arts Integration trainings across the U.S. for the non-profit Arts Integration Solutions. She continues to offer professional development in art integration methods nationally and internationally. She has presented at regional and national conferences on the visual culture of the Arpillera, the potential of art integration to foster empathy development, and challenging White supremacy in art education. Dr. Bradshaw is also a practicing fiber artist exhibiting her work regionally and nationally.
Dr. Novea McIntosh is an Assistant Professor, Coordinator of the Adolescent to Young Adult program and co-director of the Urban Teacher Academy in the School of Education and Health Sciences at the University of Dayton. She received a Bachelor of Arts at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica in History and Secondary Education. She migrated to the United States of America in 2002. She received her Master of Education at Indiana Wesleyan University in Education Leadership. She attained her Ed.D at Walden University with a focus on Educational Administrative Leadership Teaching and Learning. Dr. McIntosh taught and served as a school principal in underserved urban school in the Dayton, Ohio for 13 years. Her teaching focuses on educating diverse populations in inclusive settings and assessment literacy. Her scholarship focuses on culturally responsive pedagogy and formative assessment of diverse students. She coaches, presents at conferences and provides professional development to in-service and pre-service teachers in areas of culturally responsive pedagogy, diversity and assessment both nationally and internationally.