Visual Arts & Design

Amy’s scholarship, teaching and community engagement focus on how the arts and arts education can challenge and reinforce systems of inequality. Her research seeks to understand this contradiction by (1) examining the ways in which social, cultural, political, and economic contexts shape the arts in education and (2) investigating how macro-relations of power interact with more intimate formations of knowledge and subjectivity, most especially among teachers. She employs interdisciplinary theories and methodologies that draw from the social sciences, cultural studies, and critical race studies. Her current projects consider the politics and pedagogies of difference in urban schools, museums, and teacher education. She is co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook on Race and the Arts in Education as well as Pedagogies in the Flesh: Case Studies on the Embodiment of Sociocultural Differences in Education (both forthcoming) Her research can be found in the recently edited volumes Intersectionality and Urban Education: Identities, Policies, Spaces and Power (2014) and The Education of Black Males in a Post-Racial World (2012). She also has journal articles published in Studies in Art Education, Art Education, International Journal of Education and the Arts, Race Ethnicity and Education, The Urban Review, Equity and Excellence in Education, Educational Studies, and Teaching Education.

At the undergraduate level, Amy works to cultivate equity consciousness, autocritique, and culturally resonant pedagogic practices among aspiring art educators. She teaches doctoral and master's level courses on anti-oppressive education, critical race theory and critical whiteness studies, and theories identity and agency in art and museum education. She also leads graduate seminars in qualitative research and enjoys mentoring students in visual and ethnographic methods and dialogic critique grounded in an ethics of engagement with minoritized and economically vulnerable communities. Amy served as the founding director of UNT's Urban Art Education Studies initiative (2015-16) and program coordinator for Visual Art Studies (2015).

Amy's current role at UNT is informed by her prior professional experiences. She taught in Title 1 public schools and community art settings. She also was a gallery teacher in a museum program designed for underrepresented groups of middle grade students. As an arts administrator, she developed community-university partnerships that leveraged resources to provide intensive arts learning and leadership experiences for low-income, Black, and Latino youth.

At the same time, Amy’s research and teaching translate into community engagement and service to the university and the field of art education. She is a consultant on urban art education reform in local school districts. At UNT, she is a peer-mentor for grant-funded women of color faculty groups, and she co-organizes and participates in academic symposia highlighting the breadth of research and experiences of women of color faculty. She works to bring outside speakers to the UNT campus in order to spotlight scholars, practitioners, and community leaders whose work reimagines the role of the arts in society and in the lives of marginalized people.

Amy is the Editor of the journal Art Education. She has served on the editorial review boards of the journals Art Education, International Journal of Education and the Arts, Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education, Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, and Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy and has been an invited peer reviewer for The Urban Review, Curriculum Inquiry, and Educational Studies.

Prior to UNT, Amy earned her Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction with a specialization in Cultural Studies in Education and an M.A. in Art Education from The University of Texas at Austin. She graduated magna cum laude from Wellesley College in Massachusetts with a B.A. in Studio Art and Economics minor.

Doctoral Student Research
Tim Garth, Art Education Policy: Interpretation and the Negotiation of Praxis
David Herman, Perceiving Indeterminacy: A Phenomenological Research Study of the Perceptual Rites of Passage of Preadolescents
Emily Jean Hood, Creative Matter: Exploring the Co-Creative Nature of Things
Milan Jilka, Artistic Learning in an MFA Community
Sarah Travis, Portraits of Young Artists in post-Katrina New Orleans: Identity Work and Social Justice in Art Education