2025 MAAD Virtual Capstone Exhibition

As an art teacher at a STEAM school, I saw that academic teachers were in need of hands-on experience with art materials to help them feel more excited about integrating art into their academic classes. I created lessons that would teach teachers art techniques, vocabulary, and give them more experience with Art.

I concluded that teachers may benefit more from relaxing art projects like painting with watercolor, drawing zentangles and mandalas than learning specific art techniques or vocabulary. For teachers to integrate art into their classroom, they need to see how art can be enjoyable and beneficial to them in their lives. In the future I plan to have materials for mandalas, watercolor, and art materials in a “Zen room” in our school to help teachers find enjoyment in visual art.

Fiber arts are rarely highlighted in art curricula, mine included. My thesis project focuses on integrating fiber arts into my current curriculum. My school doesn’t have a Family and Consumer Sciences teacher, and I know that there are life skills that are taught in that class that are very useful to our students. One of those life skills is sewing. I knew I could teach that skill in my class in various ways, along with other fiber arts lessons.

I have a vast background in fiber arts, and I want to share my knowledge with my students. The lessons I have developed encompass a range of skills, including hand and machine sewing, weaving, needle felting, embroidery, and yarn painting. I have organized a scaffolded approach to teaching these skills to challenge my students. Of the nine lessons, I was able to teach four of them. Doing this gave me time to reflect on how the project went, the student success rate, and decide if I want to repeat the project.

"Ignite From Within: Creative Leadership Guide to Fostering Team Innovation" is a heartfelt invitation to reimagine how we lead, connect, and create together. In this capstone project, I developed a book titled "Ignite From Within" that weaves research, storytelling, and real-world examples to explore how intentional spaces, flexible mindsets, and courageous, creative leadership can transform silos into thriving hubs of collaboration and growth.

Rooted in the belief that creativity is not a luxury but a cultural necessity, "Ignite From Within" calls us to protect the spark of new ideas, fan the flames through trust and connection, and nurture teams where people feel safe to take risks and share boldly. More than theory, this book project can show a blueprint for leading creative teams and igniting authentic, student-centered cultures that honor curiosity, belonging, and co-creation. "Ignite From Within" project will remind us that cultivating environments alive with possibility opens the door to bold, human-centered innovation that shapes a better future for everyone.

The aim of my project, the “Virtual Art Club,” was to provide a safe, engaging, virtual environment for my current Georgia Connections Academy high school students. I am continuing my exploration of virtual platforms and how they can enhance accessibility to art and foster a creative community. Since my students are virtual, their ‘class time’ is limited, and their extracurricular and social activities face various challenges. My research centered on the development, implementation, and evaluation of a virtual art club designed specifically for virtual high school students, with a focus on accessibility, engagement, peer relations, and artistic growth.

This initiative stems from the ‘want’ and ‘need’ of a virtual space for my students to collaborate, engage, create, and innovate through art. Many students with an interest in visual arts lack consistent opportunities to engage with peers, receive mentorship, or showcase their work. A virtual option or platform could effectively address this gap! By leveraging digital tools, the Virtual Art Club seeks to bridge that gap, offering a flexible, inclusive space for students to explore their creativity, build portfolios, and connect with their like-minded peers, regardless of their geographical location.

This capstone project explores how motivation and engagement, driven by autonomy, self-efficacy, and meaningful connection, can be fostered through media arts in middle school classrooms. Grounded in Self-Determination Theory and Social Cognitive Theory, it emphasizes student-centered strategies such as reflection, choice, and collaboration to build intrinsic motivation. Assessing engagement through observations, work samples, and self-assessments provides a comprehensive view of student learning that extends beyond mere compliance.

One key finding revealed that autonomy significantly increases engagement. Comparing a teacher-directed structured project to a student-choice-based project showed that students are more motivated when trusted to make vital creative decisions based on their learning. As a result, effective media arts integration must include not just tools, but a willing and open student voice seeking purpose.

To support this approach, an interactive ART STUDIO slides presentation was developed as a multimedia resource hub, giving students independent access to studio processes and concepts. One featured project, typographic self-portraits using descriptive character traits, blends identity exploration with media arts skills like layout, typography, and color theory., Students gained deeper self-awareness while building creative confidence.

Overall, this project demonstrates that empowering students through art fosters motivation, engagement, and personal growth during a pivotal stage of development.

Em’s Portrait Adventure is a 20-page art activity book designed for students aged 10–13 and educators alike. The story follows Em, an adventurous, curious, and artistic cat, based on my real cat, Mooshi. Em’s Portrait Adventure is more than just a coloring book for fun, but it’s an interactive moment that turns art into a playful, resourceful, and unique product! My goal was to give space for students to connect with art and history while still developing their voice. Em travels through time and cultures by jumping into famous portraits in her studio to begin her adventures into art!

For my project, I chose to create Em as she explored the meaning of portraiture. This discovery goes from the history of portraits, looking at artists, to creating your own. Each page is a blend of art history with hands-on activities, to help students understand and learn about things like drawing facial features and drawing pixel art avatars, and more open-ended portrait drawing. This project can support interdisciplinary content as it connects writing, reading, history, and art contexts.

With the ubiquitous nature of digital tools for creating art and the advent of Artificial Intelligence (the “non-human artist”), I wanted to investigate the implementation of AI into my art curriculum through a series of class projects. Using a variety of digital tools to compose artworks has been an ongoing effort of mine to help students develop 21st Century skills they can take into the modern world over a range of professions. The text-to-image functionality of numerous AI programs has now entered the equation with the potential to disrupt the artworld in terms of authenticity, creativity, and legality.

While AI continues to develop in terms of accessibility, ease of use, and competency of the non-human artist, teachers need to engage this technology in the classroom and keep up with the most recent developments. My project is one that will continue to develop over time as I work with my students within a Students as Partners framework to refine the curriculum to give the most beneficial and worthwhile experiences.

This project explores the role that play had in instigating a creative surge. It is well accepted that unstructured play is necessary for a child’s development and is important not only for fostering creativity but also for helping with social interactions. The importance of play is not restricted to children, however, as adults also require moments of play for many of the same reasons. In the Advanced Studio Practice and Reflective Teaching course (ARED 6110) at KSU, I found myself in a creative quagmire trying to paint a photorealistic painting.

The process to produce the painting was excruciating, the completed painting was disappointing, and overall, it caused an enormous amount of dissatisfaction in my creative output, which affected my mentality. What followed, however, was an explosion of creativity as I began to reject the style I had adopted. I played. I experimented. After spending three weeks on a single, photoreal painting, I was able to produce 20 paintings in the weeks that followed that were quick, fun, and playful. This project allowed me to investigate how play shaped my creativity, resulting in increased enjoyment and satisfaction in the product through creating 10 paintings.

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Waiting for Myself to be Myself Again: Learning Patience and Building Perseverance to Continue My Goal of being a Lifelong Learner

I had always planned to attend graduate school, and I just had to wait for the opportunity to present itself. We live in a world of instant everything; texts instead of calls and same-day delivery instead of going to the store. In a world that craves instant gratification, waiting has become a lost art. As an older student, I remember when the world was much larger and most things required patience. This is not a negative rant about society today, but a reflective look into my experiences and how waiting influenced who I am today.

Embracing patience and strengthening my perseverance through waiting were essential to my personal growth, particularly during seasons when I felt lost, uncertain, or disconnected from who I was, and these qualities empowered me to remain committed to a goal of being a lifelong learner. Using a/r/tography and journaling, I reflected on my life and how different seasons of waiting were pivotal moments. With patience and grit acquired through those moments of waiting, I remained empowered to fulfill my goals and dreams.

How does emphasizing process over product in high school art education influence students' willingness to take creative risks and embrace mistakes? How can we encourage creativity by rejecting perfection and embracing play? This project was initiated from my experiences in the high school art classroom. Specifically, since fall 2020, I have observed a decline in the creative engagement of my students. In response to this creative decline, I implemented a daily sketchbook practice called Sketchbook Starters in my Painting 1 course to encourage artistic experimentation and build resistance to perfectionism and the fear of failure.

As my students and I progressed through the Sketchbook Starters challenges, their engagement in creative risk-taking and willingness to experiment with materials inspired me to challenge them with more assignments focused on process over product. After this semester’s exploration into creativity, I am delighted to say that I both see and feel joy in my classroom again. The Sketchbook Starters project required their mental presence and willingness to take risks and ultimately instilled confidence and self-trust within my students and their creativity.

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In my classroom, I started noticing not only artistic development within my students but emotional development as well. My older elementary students were starting to endure stress, trauma, and personal situations that required sorting through big emotions. I wanted to find a way for them to express their feelings while still exploring their creativity. Art journaling was the perfect idea. It provides a fun, creative, and expressive outlet for them to express their thoughts, feelings, and ideas.

By combining art with writing, the visual diary allows for them to connect their writing and drawings for a deeper understanding. They used different mediums and were excited to come in every day and grab their journals. Students had a variety of artistic pages in their art journals including basic color theories and self-portrait collages. This process provided them a safe place to create, express their individuality, and it taught them accountability.

In my project 'Modernizing Color Theory – Contemporary Art Education', I developed a series of lesson plans aimed at shifting art instruction from the traditional Red-Yellow-Blue (RYB) color model to the more scientifically accurate Cyan-Magenta-Yellow (CMY) model. I believe CMY better reflects how we biologically perceive color, as it aligns with the Red-Green-Blue (RGB) cone cells in the human eye and show inversed relations in printing and digital technologies.

The curriculum I designed includes seven sequential lessons that build on each other, starting with an introduction to CMY color theory and moving into value, saturation, color temperature, RGB lighting, and expressive color use. Each lesson is hands-on and includes activities, critiques, and discussions to help students internalize the concepts. The final project asks students to create an original work that showcases their understanding of color from multiple angles.

My goal is to give students a more contemporary and scientifically grounded understanding of color, which I feel is long overdue in art education. By teaching CMY, I want to equip young artists with tools that are not only accurate but also more adaptable to both traditional, modern, and emerging artistic practices.

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I ended up turning towards a subject that greatly appealed to me both personally and professionally. As a person who has dealt with stress, anxiety, and some depression their entire life, participating in a study to create daily art to benefit well-being seemed to strongly fit my purpose. The inspiration for developing my research idea came from an assigned book in one of my master’s courses. I enjoyed reading about the author’s daily goal of creating art in her sketchbook and reflecting on things that happened in her day. Like her, I often put my own artmaking to the side due to other priorities and often only created art examples when I had been teaching elementary art.

Art has always been a means of stress-relief and source of boosting my mood throughout my life. I wanted to focus on sources that support how this truth works for other people, including children, and how mixing daily art making with mindfulness can be beneficial. I chose to use other books to guide my mindfulness and a mood-tracking app to document moods and thoughts. Overall, I feel my personal experience with this project was very beneficial as well as influential in teaching art to others. 

I titled my project "Be Positively Creative,” and it has been created to address the unique challenges faced by emerging art educators. During my first three years, I experienced a mix of content-specific professional development and often felt isolated in my role due to several factors. This inspired me to create a comprehensive database of resources for art teachers, aimed at making their teaching lives easier and providing continued access to learning opportunities. The project also advocated the importance of understanding the unique needs of art educators and fostering a supportive community.

The website images highlight various page options such as grade-level resources, medium-specific resources, and a list of museums from around the world. It also features an "about me" page that gives a brief description of why the website was created and my teaching philosophy, providing users with an insight into the person behind the project. For me, this project will be a continuous work in progress, and I plan to keep adding resources as I find them (or as they are shared with me!)

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As the sole art educator at a private Christian school in Macon, Georgia, I serve students from 1st through 12th grade in a limited and often challenging classroom environment. With minimal space, no sink, limited technology and few resources, teaching art becomes both creatively fulfilling and logistically overwhelming. To address this, I propose the development of nine reusable and adaptable core art lesson plans. These lessons will form the backbone of a sustainable, year-long curriculum designed to promote creativity, build technical skills, and foster a joy for learning in every student.

By creating this structure, I can reduce the weekly pressure of planning and materials management while focusing more on differentiating instruction, documenting student growth, and supporting their individual artistic journeys. These plans will not only serve my current students but can also be transferred to future teaching roles, making them a long-term investment in both educational quality and teacher well-being. My vision is to create a classroom environment that reflects resilience, joy, and the power of art—even in less-than-ideal conditions. This proposal supports student growth, improves instructional consistency, and helps preserve the mental and emotional energy needed to teach with purpose and passion.

This project explores the impact of objectification and self-objectification on children, drawing on academic research, personal reflection, and artistic expression. Rooted in my perspective as both a parent and educator, this work examines how societal messages about body image begin influencing children at an early age, shaping their self-worth, behaviors, and relationships. It discusses the roles of media, family dynamics, and school environments in reinforcing harmful beauty ideals and the long-term psychological consequences, including disordered eating, anxiety, and diminished self-esteem.

The project emphasizes the importance of modeling positive behaviors, promoting body neutrality, and creating environments that affirm children’s intrinsic worth. In my series of six mixed-media artworks, I demonstrate a deeply personal narrative through themes such as trust, affirmation, struggle, and growth. Strategies for prevention and intervention—including media literacy, open dialogue, and body-positive parenting—are proposed as essential tools for disrupting harmful patterns. My capstone project advocates for a cultural shift that prioritizes emotional resilience and self-acceptance in children. It calls on caregivers and educators to recognize their influence and challenge systems that commodify appearance, so future generations can grow up feeling empowered, valued, and free from the burdens of objectification.

One-third of the average human lifespan is spent asleep. For a third of my existence I have explored and returned to spaces that only exist in the dream realm and that are primarily solitary in nature. These dream spaces have been a recurring point of fascination for me and I have long wanted to have visual documentation of them that can be accessed while awake.

For my capstone project I have explored the mapping of an initial set of dream spaces through illustrative means. My intent is to use this set of interlinked images as a starting point that can be added to indefinitely. The series has been arranged visually in a travel journal framework to show connections and isolations between places, as well as potential bridges to the waking world. As an artist and an educator, it has been my intent to embrace this project as a life-long learner. This dream journal is my starting point for the development of an extended personal visual record of dream space locations. I am an explorer documenting previously inaccessible terrain that is located in the dream state. I am sharing worlds that until now, have only been accessible to me.

In this exhibition, my capstone project seeks to explore the importance of process-based, interest-driven learning and its importance in art pedagogy to help neurodiverse student populations unmask and express their most authentic selves, and the benefits of unmasking to build personal self-confidence and self-understanding. Driven by a self-inquiry and personal reflection upon receiving my own diagnosis, my capstone project explores how my reactions to different mediums, materials, and techniques impacts my interest and motivation within how I create art and how creating art about a recently discovered facet of my identity allows me to better understand myself, my condition, and how to best advocate and express myself.

Getting to create with personal aesthetics or interests in mind students can accept new challenges with new materials to best communicate themselves through their art, further discovering certain methodologies are great sources of drive allowing the artist to overcome multiple setbacks in creating, and help foster resilience to return repeatedly return to challenges in search of new and effective solutions. Being able to reflect upon what I have learned, I am not better able to bring the ethos of my project into my own pedagogy to better serve my students.

Title: Seeing Beauty Look closer.

That’s the essence of my capstone project. I sought out beauty in ordinary and ugly places, and found it in trash, corrosion, abandoned places and unattended corners. For each location, I took photographs and compiled them into videos that are meant to be instructive. They show the overview, the medium shot and then the beauty focal points. I wrote a blog post about each experience.

This project was intended to educate both myself and the viewers of my Seeing Beauty website, as well as the people who become directly involved in my process as I was exploring. I believe that anyone can learn to perceive beauty - it doesn’t require an art degree, a particular talent, or access to a museum.

My project had personal significance as well. I was in the midst of shutting down and selling off my glass studio, which had been the base of my teaching for six years. I was struggling to find a new identity as an artist and teacher without a studio. By wandering the city to find beauty, I rediscovered my core beliefs about art and teaching.

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Inspired by my professional teaching experience and personal experience as a neurodivergent student, I created an online professional development resource for art teachers about accommodating neurodiversity. I designed an educational presentation that art teachers can review at their own pace. The presentation provides research backed information about neurodiversity, ADHD, ASD, models of disability, and extensive examples of accommodations that can be implemented in the art classroom.

After reviewing the presentation, art teachers will be equipped with the information and empathy needed to support neurodivergent students. I also designed lesson plans and printable materials, so art educators have an easy and accessible start for accommodating neurodiversity. I made lesson plans for K-8th grade that each have visual slides to support and engage students. I also wrote a lesson plan for high school- specifically for a digital design course. My printable materials include two designs of regulation menus, two designs of a customizable visual checklist, and a customizable visual schedule. Both the schedule and checklist features tasks and activities that are specific to the art classroom. All aspects of my project, including a reflection of creating this resource as a neurodivergent student, are hosted on a dedicated website.

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As a young adult in society today I am experiencing and witnessing change everyday, within myself as well as in society. Social media is a big thing today as technology advances and I believe it has a huge impact and influence over how we view ourselves as well as sets standards for what we feel we must fit into. These standards not only relate to our identity/image but also to things like relationships, work, lifestyle, etc. This has a big impact on the youth today because the majority of them only know a life with social media and advanced technology.

Throughout my research and creation I dive deep into this and explore how these technology advances really impact and change things around us as well as within us. Through the art pieces I reflect on what I learned as well as display some of the emotions I felt in regards to the topic. These pieces will help display the impact of social media on the youth and give insight into the emotional side of it as well.

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This research project aims to explore my identity and foster growth in my artistic practice by creating a series of self-portraits inspired by a group of female artists who have experienced symptoms of mental illness. This project represents a journey into the self through my self-portraits and works by Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, and Kay Sage. These women utilized their artistic medium to delve into the depths of their inner selves and create a counter-narrative to present to the world.

Both being a woman in a male-dominated art world and struggling with mental health were viewed by society as weaknesses. Yet, these women shine a light on their struggles, highlighting their dignity and resilience. In my series of self-portraits, I selected a work from each artist as a starting point for an exploration of my mental health and its impact on my sense of identity, which I hope will motivate other artists and students to do the same.

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Miscarriage is often considered a taboo subject, but it is important to discuss since it is more common than most people realize and grieving women may not feel that they can talk about their losses. This project explores the emotions and challenges that women experience after miscarriage. Additionally, I created a body of artwork that represents my personal narrative of grieving the death and loss of six babies during pregnancy. My initial goals were achieved; however, my project evolved for me personally. My losses took place years ago, and I believed I was emotionally healed.

My research gave a name to many of the aspects of grief that I experienced, but what surprised me were the intense feelings that I experienced while creating many of my art pieces. I realized that I have been carrying some hurt from my losses for years. I imagine that there are many women like me who have experienced the grief of miscarriage but just had to keep on keeping on and tucked some of those hurts away rather than addressing them. My experience demonstrates how art can be a powerful tool for exploring the complex emotions surrounding pregnancy loss and help bring true healing.

The self-portrait is one of the most intimate forms of art. Through self-portraits, individuals can show their inner desires, their concept of self, and their belief in how we present ourselves to the world. This study explored self-recognition in young children with autism spectrum disorder, in the form of self-portraits.

The project consisted of an avatar generator created specifically with the facial features and interests of the students in mind. The generator provided fields of 4-8 selections for each feature and was used in a “click and pop” method, meaning that features auto-populated once clicked and were unable to be moved. Students were individually prompted to create their own avatars that represented a self-portrait. The outcomes were overwhelmingly accurate and imply that these students have a better grasp of their own appearances than previously thought. It allowed young children with autism to have a voice and choose how they are seen in a way they never have before.

My experience as a photographer and photography educator is what has informed my interests in cyanotype and research for this project. Photography education today exists at the intersection of tradition and innovation. Digital technology has changed how we capture, manipulate, and share images. I have found that relying on the editing strengths that digital processes have and combining them with more tactile historical processes such as cyanotypes, we are able to create new and exciting work that maximizes each of the processes strengths into something new and more impactful.

This cyanotype project challenged students to step out of their comfort zones while reinforcing technical and conceptual skills. By combining digital image-making with historical processes, students discovered that the boundary between old and new media is not fixed but an area of play and experimentation that can push creativity past its initial points. This project explores how hybrid approaches can enhance students' creative process and critical thinking, and shares ways digital processes and cyanotypes can be implemented effectively in the classroom.

Memory, for many artists, can be used as a guide in creating artwork. Past and deeply personal narratives can be woven into a creative tapestry, especially when understanding one’s role in an interdependent household. After discovering a plethora of photographs taken by members of my family, I was compelled to create photograph collages that reflected scenes from my childhood. Questioning the boundaries of my own memories, I sought more evidence on the reliability and importance of using memory as a catalyst to create photographic collages, even going as far as to travel to the places where many of these images were taken.

Utilizing these found family photographs as a primary medium for reconstruction, I attempt to convey memories related to childhood joy and how the abstraction of memory can ultimately affect present beliefs of the past. Additionally, in returning to the space where many of these images originated, I have reinterpreted the meaning of each artwork and formed new associations with my younger self.

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Can I still be a punky, nerdy, goth as a professional? My project investigates current standards and expectations for educators and their clothing. Throughout this project, the consensus was that “formal” clothing should be worn at the beginning of the semester but can be relaxed as classroom culture grows. Relaxed business-casual is widely accepted, and students engage better with teachers who express their personalities. However, teachers must remember that they serve as role models for their students.

For the physical project, I experimented with 3 techniques to make my own professional punk/nerd/goth clothing. My first success is a green shirt that has vintage poisonous flower illustrations sublimated on like tattoos. My not-so-professional white shirt has stamps of grungy D20 dice in acrylic paint. My next success is an embroidered black shirt with natural symbolism of life and death. While only two of these shirts came out “professional”, I would still call this experiment a success because any of these methods can be translated to smaller projects for students who may be inspired to make their own clothing. This coming school year, I will be proud to wear the successful designs and excited to show off the subcultures hidden in them.

This project, titled “Community Canvas: Art for All,” aims to build a supportive community by partnering with military installations to offer engaging art workshops for service members, their spouses, and children. This initiative is inspired by a deep understanding of the special challenges faced by military families. Having personally experienced military life, I have seen firsthand the feelings of isolation and the mental health struggles that can come from frequent moves and constant transitions.

At its heart, “Community Canvas” hopes to bring joy and benefits to military families using the healing power of art. Its mission is to encourage self-expression and connection within a caring environment, helping to improve their overall well-being through comfort, inspiration, and a strong sense of belonging. Looking ahead, the vision is to create an inclusive platform where art has no boundaries, sparking creativity and building bonds for people of all ages and backgrounds within military communities.

Through this capstone project, I developed strategies for community engagement, a personalized marketing plan, and diverse art programs, including family activities. This plan involves a sustainable business model and applying for grants to support these meaningful initiatives. Community Canvas is excited to become a valuable resource for military families.

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Audio Drama: The Power of Sound is my final project in the KSU MAAD program, using an A/R/Tographic research approach. A/R/Tography combines and integrates the roles of Artist, Researcher, and Teacher. I produced two original audio drama series, collected feedback (data) from listeners and co-creators, then I used the data to add characters and develop relationships in order to continue creating the series.

By using listener feedback as data, my aim was to uncover how audio drama connects to our emotional memory and fosters imaginative engagement. It was exciting, challenging, and full of surprises. Beyond the creative journey, I found that the A/R/Tographic method has powerful applications in the classroom, especially when it comes to project-based learning, teamwork, and helping students build real-world collaboration skills. This project was messy, fun, a little scary at times—but ultimately, an incredibly rewarding experience. The images provided contain QR codes that allow you to listen the episodes on YouTube.

CONTENT WARNING: The episodes are made for adults. They contain mature language, mature content, violence, and some scenes of abuse.

“Tell It Like It Is” is a visual and written exploration of self-portraiture as a means of healing, resistance, and self-definition for Dark-Skinned Black women. Through the creation of eight self-portrait photographs, I am the subject and sole creative force reclaiming what Colorism has historically denied me and women who look like me. The work interrogates the psychological toll of being unseen, even while being asked to make others visible as an artist and educator. I share my lived experiences, journal entries, and cultural observations to examine how internalized beauty standards and societal neglect distort both self-perception and artistic expression.

This collection is a counter-narrative to the dominant discourse around Colorism, which is often rooted in trauma, by centering joy, creativity, and visual literacy. It also reflects my commitment to inspiring young Black girls, especially those I teach, to see themselves as worthy, powerful, and artistically talented, no matter the insults hurled at their backs. Dark-Skinned Black Women deserve Joy, Flavor, and the opportunity to pursue all things “for the culture” and ourselves. Representation matters most to those who have never seen themselves in light. They must know they are worthy of basking in their own greatness.

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This project investigates how middle school art students engage with and attribute meaning to personally relevant stories through the act of creating a functional art object that represents their stories. The research consisted of observing and recording field notes on the questions, responses, processes, and products created by 22 eighth-graders in an elective, year-long, advanced art course in a public school in Georgia.

The students were presented with instructions in a unit of six lessons that took place over the course of a month and tasked with creating a functional art object that represented a story. Students chose a story that held personal significance to visually represent through their objects and had autonomy over the materials and methods used to create their art objects.

Through this project, the majority of students were actively engaged in the planning, artmaking, critiquing and presenting of the work, and were invested in both the function and aesthetic of the final product. Additionally, the observation of students revealed that levels of problem-solving and collaboration increased during the project.

This project explores the establishment of an after-school art club specifically to connect to our community through outreach opportunities.

The idea for starting an art club with my elementary fourth and fifth grade students came about with a comment by one child wishing to stay in the art room longer while working on a project that was meaningful. This began my thoughts on how to develop a club that would impact our community with a cause to bring about passion in a students art.

The club focused on an art pour with an outside visiting artist, empty clay bowls made/donated to the soup kitchen, quilt birds that promote community stories, recycled art to promote resourcefulness, cake decorating at a restaurant for learning life skills, and an end of year fifth grade challenge. The club provided a place for students to explore, collaborate, build community outreach, self-confidence, and critical thinking. It helped the students see that art with a purpose can make a difference. Essentially, the club became an invaluable asset at our school to build relationships and awareness, and there are plans in the works to continue this fall with new members, new outreach projects, and new artistic mediums to promote a growth mindset.

I created a website about how to access and use the creative process in one’s daily life. Taking ideas from how artists use their creativity, I show how those skills transfer to more mundane tasks such as: cooking, writing, getting dressed, or simply being more aware about the world we live in. I include short and very tactical exercises that anyone can do to increase their capacity to think more creatively in their day-to-day routines.

The website was designed to be accessible for anyone regardless of experience using the creative process. Some of the exercises are in written format, others have videos or images that accompany them. As an art educator, I feel it is part of my responsibility to dispel the common myth that creativity is solely an inborn trait. Instead, I present it as a skill that can be developed over time by anyone. In addition, creativity is a skill that is required, not only within the arts, but in nearly every other field. When we exercise our creativity we exercise our humanity. This resource can be viewed on my website.

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I began my research on creativity to reconnect with my own. Being an educator is never easy- we face daily challenges, and we tend to neglect our own well-being. I found myself artistically stuck, unable to create art that felt meaningful. I began by reading and reflecting on my teaching practice. I realized that I had become my own worst critic, I was holding myself back from being creative, out of fear of making “bad art” and being judged.

While I believe teaching skills are essential for learning, I have come to see that it is equally important to give students time to experiment with art mediums, embrace mistakes, and keep an open mind. This is how creativity growth happens. In my paintings, you can see how I went from a traditional to a more contemporary approach. I started with a landscape, then moved onto portraits. I explored Encaustics, where I had to let myself create without a plan and let intuition guide me. My final piece is a contemporary portrait of my mother, an immigrant who has worked very hard for our family to have a better life.

My project explores the evolving tradition and personal significance of quilting in the American South through the creation of four quilt squares. Inspired by a lifelong appreciation for antiques and repurposed textiles, I set out to understand the cultural, historical, and artistic impact of quilting. Each square represents a different era or influence: the artistry of the Gee’s Bend quilters utilizing repurposed fabrics, the utilitarian “make-do” scrap fabric approach of the Southern textile boom, the decorative innovation of embroidered crazy quilts, and the expressiveness of modern quilting as fine art.

While I have limited experience with sewing, the hands-on process deepened my appreciation for the craftsmanship and symbolism within each quilt. The project became not only an artistic endeavor but also a personal journey, honoring memory, tradition, and the way quilts serve as both functional objects and visual storytellers. As I pieced together vintage fabrics, embroidery, and even painted elements, I found quilting to be a metaphor for life: a layered reflection of time, change, and connection. This project ultimately affirms quilting as a living art form that bonds generations and preserves the beauty of everyday lives.