artist + educator

I love helping people unlock their creativity and build the skills they need to bring their ideas to life. It’s a joy for me to work with students of all ages.

I received my MA in art education from NYU and my BA in Studio Art from Vassar College. For five years, I taught art to middle schoolers at Greenwich Academy. For the next two years, I taught painting, drawing, and sculpture to high schoolers at Millbrook School. Currently, I engage children with special needs in mindfulness-based art projects at a series of public schools in the Capital Region.

TEACHING PHILOSOPHY

For me, being a painter means slowing down. It means reveling in the sensuality of paint, the thick smell of oil and turpentine. It means pausing to really see. As a teacher, I strive to help people unlock this capacity to slow down and see deeply.

One of my favorite assignments to give my students is to make a painting of a collage. In building the collage out of found papers and magazine clippings, students experiment with juxtaposing images and ideas. As a class, we are delighted by the happy accidents, the magical pairings of color and form that can happen with collage. One of my students cuts a serene black and white photograph of children playing on a craggy beach into the shape of a woman’s profile. We notice how this recognizable silhouette becomes a window onto this other world, and the young artist takes pride in making meaning and evoking memories. The next step is my favorite part. In translating their collages into paintings, my students face technical challenges. They learn how to build form, how to sculpt with paint. The final pieces balance conceptual depth with technical rigor. The process asks my students to construct an imagined world and then to slow down, to see deeply, and to figure out how to make this world visible to the outside.

Art is a respite from the chaos of the world. It is also a channel through which we can articulate the chaos of the world. It is my goal as an art teacher to help my students to experience this respite and also to express this confusion. To revel in the wonder of it all, and to question it, as well.