My instructional practice focuses on undergraduates in the Arts & Administration program, and Freshman Seminar of the First Year Programs.

In my courses students explore hidden assumptions and preconceptions about the visual world and visual experience.  They begin with examining themselves, a critical self-reflection on who they are from their sensory experience of the world to their cultural beliefs, moving ever outward from self to a plurality of cultural structures and points-of-view, embracing the richness of human diversity.  The arts provide a conceptual framework for wider explorations.  The goal is to introduce students to a set of conceptual skills for actively shaping and creating meanings in their visual experience, and discovering how other humans express their experience and identity through visual means. 

Assignments based in critical image and object analysis, creative production, discussions, and self-reflection offer a bridge between course content and individual meaning making within the influences of physical sensory experiences and a rich socio-cultural web.

Along the way I spent over a decade as an exhibiting artist, including with an artists cooperative gallery, creating objects, installations, and collaborative performance works, which helps inform my teaching.  And when I started teaching, I also began to travel around the world to see and experience, in person, events, places, and cultures.  I had always known much of art and visual/material culture through images – I wanted contextual knowledge through the lived experiences.  Being an artist and traveller both help inform my teaching.

My ongoing interest is in controversial works in current news, and further developing my knowledge of street art.

AAD Courses Taught:

AAD​ 199 Controversies in the Visual Arts
AAD 251 Art and Visual Literacy

Degrees Awarded:

Doctor of Philosophy, 1992, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon.
Master of Fine Arts (Visual Design), 1987, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon
Bachelor of Arts (Political Science), 1978, the Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio