Joni Boyd Acuff, PhD is an Associate Professor at The Ohio State University, whose work centers the intersections of race and gender in arts education research, pedagogy, and practice.

Amelia Kraehe, who more often goes by Amy, is currently an Associate Professor with tenure at the University of Arizona. Her research, teaching and community engagement focus on how the arts and arts education can challenge as well as reinforce systems of inequality. She co-edited The Palgrave Handbook on Race and the Arts in Education (2018) and is working on a new book with Joni Acuff, titled Race and Art Education.

This week, our guests discuss art and community engagement.

Melanie La Rosa is a professor of media production at Pace University in Pleasantville, New York. She is also an award winning independent filmmaker and her latest film, “How To Power A City” is currently in post production, with short excerpts screening at festivals worldwide.

Jules Rochielle Sievert is an artist and the Creative Director at NuLawLab, at Northeastern University School of Law. She has developed key cross-disciplinary institutional projects, community based partnerships and creative programs for the lab.

Anne Schaper Englot is a Professor of Practice in Architecture and Humanities in the Arts, Culture and Media Department at Rutgers University –Newark and co-directs Express Newark, a 50,000 square foot university art community center.

Victor Davson is a visual artist and founding director of Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art, in Newark, New Jersey and has served as its director for 33 years.

After a short hiatus, we're happy to share a new episode on decolonizing college art curriculum with Shylah Pacheco Hamilton and Vreni Michelini-Castillo.

Shylah Pacheco Hamilton is an Afro-Surrealist filmmaker whose creative research interests meet at the crossroads of experimental video, Black and Chicana feminist theory, and ritual performance. Her most recent work consists of experimental video and installation that explores social justice, memory, dreams, and ritual performance of the sacred. She is Chair of Diversity Studies at California College of the Arts, and teaches in the First Year Program.

Vreni Michelini-Castillo a/k/a Chhoti Maa is a multidisciplinary cultural producer with 11 years of experience working through art, cultural organizing, music, red medicine and traditional Mexican danza. She teaches at 67 Sueños, California College of the Arts, and San Francisco State University.

Amber C. Coleman is a doctoral student in Art and Visual Culture Education at the University of Arizona and Graduate Assistant at the Tucson Museum of Art.

Amber Delgado recently completed her undergraduate studies at East Carolina University where she double majored in film and art history, and currently serves as exhibitions intern and documentary diversity project program associate at The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

Carmen Neely is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Drawing & Painting at Oklahoma State University. She maintains an ongoing practice of exploring identity and memory through abstraction. Her work is represented by Jane Lombard Gallery in New York.

Jovonna Jones is a writer and teacher of race, gender, and cultural production. She is currently working on her PhD in African & African American Studies at Harvard University. She is the founder and facilitator of the Black Studies Reading Room, a monthly conversation on black literature, art, and ideas, hosted in collaboration with Boston-area bookstores and cultural institutions.

Ariana Chaivaranon is an artist and an interpretive planner at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City. Her art investigates the interface between humans and the digital, examining the consequences of virtual representation for human bodies.

Elizabeth Keto is currently a Marshall Scholar studying art history and curating at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Her research focuses on American photography, museums and public art, and the connections between art and citizenship.

Susanna Crum is an artist and educator in Louisville, Kentucky, where she teaches printmaking as an Assistant Professor at Indiana University Southeast and at Calliope Arts, a shared print media workspace she cofounded in 2015. She is President of the Mid America Print Council, and just spent a month fishing and conducting a research-based mapping project in the small town of Alvik, Norway.

Julia Lillie is a PhD Candidate at the Bard Graduate Center in New York, where she studies early modern European print culture. She is currently based in Auburn, Alabama, and is at work on her dissertation, which investigates a network of exiled Protestant engravers active in the Catholic city of Cologne in the late sixteenth century. She was previously a Collections Manager in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Sarah G. Sharp is an artist and curator whose interests include alternative social histories, language, place, technology, and craft. She is an Assistant Professor and Foundations Area Coordinator in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and teaches in the MFA in Art Practice program at SVA in New York. She lives and works in Brooklyn and Baltimore.

Meredith Starr’s artwork is based on data she observes in her personal life and an investigation of social issues. She fuses science with artifacts of our humanity, exploring themes such as desire, memory, identity politics, and ecology. She is an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at SUNY Suffolk County Community College and is a regional coordinator for the FATE organization. She lives and works in New York.

Beth Balliro and Lyssa Palu-ay, both at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, discuss the challenges and triumphs in their institution's efforts to diversify its student body.

Beth Balliro, Ph.D is an artist and scholar whose work is grounded in over twenty years of teaching in urban public schools, community settings, and museums. Her studio practice investigates the poetics and materialism of social debris while her video work seeks to uncover the many ways that social exchange is mired in concerns of race, class, gender and power. Her scholarship draws from critical pedagogy to investigate public schooling and its import for artists. She is an Associate Professor of Art Education at the Massachusetts College of Art & Design.

Lyssa Palu-ay is the Dean of the Office of Justice, Equity and Transformation (JET). JET is focused on achieving systemic equity related to access, opportunity and dignity at MassArt through the areas of transformative learning and teaching, pathways to art and design education, and retention and mentoring. Lyssa is an alumna of MassArt and a well-established member of the campus community. She is a full Professor and has served on the Studio Foundation faculty since 2001, and in 2001 assumed leadership of the Boston Public Schools mentoring program, which later became the Academic Compass Mentoring Program. Her scholarship and research interests include the history of institutes of art and design, critical race theory, and experiences of students of color in art and design education.

On this week's podcast, Canadian contemporary visual artist Meera Sethi and Arti Sandhu, Associate Professor of Fashion Design at the University of Cincinnati, engage in a rich conversation around a 2019 ad campaign by well-known Indian fashion label Raw Mango.

Raw Mango featured a Kashmiri bride to promote their winter festive collection, while at the same time the state of Kashmir was under political lockdown. Meera and Arti speak about issues around politics, privilege, and the use of craft within Indian high-fashion.