Presenter Bio - Marit Dewhurst

Marit Dewhurst is the Director of Art Education and Professor of Art and Museum Education at The City College of New York. She has spent years working in cultural organizations, arts spaces, and community centers to facilitate conversations about cultural equity, navigating difference, and building community across social barriers.

As an educator and facilitator, Marit uses the arts (both making it and talking about it) to encourage people to imagine and remember worlds beyond the status quo. She is a fan of educational experiences that challenge us to engage with people and ideas outside of our own worldviews. She often uses conversations about artworks as starting points for engaging in difficult discussions about identity, power, and our shared futures. Whether working with large groups of museum docent volunteers or small teams of teen artists, Marit regularly draws on art-making to encourage people to imagine worlds beyond the status quo. And she loves a good ice breaker.

For over 15 years, Marit has also been the Director of Art Education and Professor of Art and Museum Education at The City College of New York where she supports a community of future and practicing teaching artists. She has worked as an arts educator and program coordinator in multiple arts contexts including community centers, museums, juvenile detention centers, and international development projects. Her research and teaching interests include social justice education, community-based art, youth participatory action research, racial justice facilitation, liberatory education, and the role of the arts in community building. In addition to multiple journal articles and chapters, her first book, Social Justice Art: A framework for activist art pedagogy highlights young activist artists and was recently released in a revised second edition. Her second book,Teachers Bridging Difference: Exploring identity through art describes how to use art as a tool to connect people across different sociocultural identities. She has collaborated with colleagues to co-edit special journal issues and edited books on racial justice in museums and youth participatory research in the arts. 

When she’s not facilitating, teaching, or researching, she coordinates community art workshops, grows tomatoes, and sits on her stoop in Brooklyn.