About Me

As an artist, scholar, and educator, I am passionate about the possibilities emerging through the intersections of arts, education, and technology. I believe such intersections can facilitate and provoke critical interfaces across human relationships, and I’m particularly interested in the arts’ potential to be a nexus for community development and social innovation.

My primary research areas include arts-based educational research, youth media, digital storytelling, community art education, visual research methodologies, and digital-mediated arts practice. My current scholarship explores ways of envisioning community as the space of knowledge production where artful social innovations and pedagogical relations can be re-imagined. I am a strong advocate of practice-led research and community engagement.

I am an adjunct professor and research grant facilitator in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University in Canada. I am the principal editor of a forthcoming collection, Thinking Transversally: International Perspectives on Community Art Education. Currently, I am the principal investigator for two Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)-funded studies:

• Partnership Engage Grant – COVID-19 Special Initiative (Storied lives: An impact study of COVID-19 on seniors and their community support services, 2020-2022).
• Insight Grant (The Transversality Hub: Towards a new mode of learning for community arts practice, 2016-2021).

I recently served as program chair for the 2019 InSEA (International Society for Education through Art) World Congress (https://www.insea2019.org), overseeing the entire congress program consisting of 600 scholarly presentations, 30 artmaking sessions, four keynotes and two award-based lectures, and seven art exhibitions. From 2014 to 2017, I was a postdoctoral research fellow for the project Pedagogical assemblage: Building and sustaining capacity through mentoring programs in British Columbia (SSHRC Partnership Development Grant, 2014–2017; Dr. Rita Irwin, principal investigator). Before that, I held a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship with the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at the University of British Columbia (2011–2013).

For eight years, I was a faculty advisor supervising student-teaching practicum assignments at UBC.  I hold a doctorate in the Department of Art Education in the School of Art & Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

On a personal note, I live in North Vancouver, British Columbia on the unceded traditional territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl ̓ ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. I would like to thank the Coast Salish people for the opportunity to learn, share, and grow on their traditional territory.