Teaching Philosophy

Professional Experience

Creating together is an invitation to come into full aliveness, trust each other, imagine new worlds, and tend to each other’s dreams. When we create with our hands—side by side, flowing together, our hearts open to each other. Creating connects us to our deepest selves, and what emerges from us — witnessed — connects us to each other. We need the gifts inside all of us.

The future is with the people who feel. As an artist and art educator, my life’s work is to create and hold space for creation. Holding space for creating means making a safe space for children to develop emotional sovereignty, so they can feel their emotions fully and metabolize them into meaning and beauty. Children who learn to wield their sensitivity become deep listeners and leaders in their communities.

Children learn to enter the flow state through creating. Being able to access this meditative state helps them find ease and vitality through life’s pains and changes, no matter their life path. For this reason, I am more concerned with process than product. The creation process allows students to experience unity between mind and body, grounding the nervous system, expanding possibilities. Through play and project-based learning, I center their intuition, critical thinking, and problem solving in response to the ever changing outside world. I teach in the precious space where art and justice meet to reshape our world; as students realize their agency as artists, they are inspired to be activists, understanding that the act of creating itself is radical in an unequal world designed to exploit our labor and sever us from nature.