Teaching Philosophy

My teaching philosophy translates my creative focus on intimacy and connection to “harness the power of my students’ everyday(s) and give them better ways to connect through and around that. [. . .] I use the relative safety of school to demonstrate the ways in which the world can go better if you bring your whole self to the table,” as I detailed in my introductory essay for Art As Social Action, the socially engaged art textbook that I co-edited with Gregory Sholette. I have centered my own teaching, as well as my understanding for the potential of socially engaged art as a field, around the following thought questions:

What happens if we take the same care with our relationships as we invest in our practice?

What happens if we take the same care with our practice that we demonstrate in our relationships?

My full teaching philosophy statement can be found here.

My teaching has been focused at Queens College CUNY and through my position as co-director of Social Practice CUNY (fka Social Practice Queens), a pedagogical experiment and educational platform that supports the integration of studio art with interdisciplinary research, community collaboration, environmental justice and critical urbanism. At Queens College (where I have been appointed as an Assistant Professor in Studio Art since 2017), I teach courses in social practice and performance for graduate and undergraduate students, as well as interdisciplinary graduate seminars on diverse topics ranging including: Work, Museums in Response to Crisis, (developed in conjunction with the CUNY School of Professional Studies MA in Museum Studies), Adventure, Play, writing for artists, and creative project management, as well as independent studies on exhibition design, conceptual art, text-based art, and other topics. Links to syllabi can be found below.

Student work has resulted in diverse pedagogical, aesthetic and public outcomes, most recently Art As Social Action: 10 Years of Social Practice Queens, an exhibition of alumni work that I curated at the Queens Museum in 2021. We released an accompanying catalog featuring essays by Tom Finkelpearl, Gregory Sholette, and myself, alongside interviews with Maureen Connor and Prerana Reddy, and full exhibition documentation.