Rika Burnham
Instructor

Email:rb436@columbia.edu
Phone:212-678-3419

Biographical Information:
Rika Burnham is an Associate Museum Educator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she has been a member of the teaching staff since 1978. She instructs students, docents, and teachers in the appreciation and understanding of the collections of the Museum, and coordinates the afterschool programs Free Classes for High School Students and The Metropolitan Museum of Art: A Place for Junior High School Students. In 1997, Burnham joined the faculty of Teachers College, Columbia University, as an adjunct professor in museum studies.

Burnham has been a visiting lecturer for docents and staff at many museums, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts/Boston, The Art Institute of Chicago, Carnegie Museum of Art, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Denver Art Museum, Delaware Museum of Art, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg, The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, The Art Museum of Princeton University, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Newark Museum, The Munson- Williams-Proctor Institute, Rochester Memorial Art Gallery, Ringling Museum, RISD Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum, The National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian, Smith College Art Museum, Wadsworth Athenaeum, and the Williams College Art Museum. In 1992, she became co-director and lecturer for the Summer Seminar for Docents at the Clark Art Institute, a nationally known week-long learning project for docents, and in 1998, 1999, and 2000 presented workshops at the New England Docent Symposium in Portland, Maine, as well as at the 1998 Connecticut Docent Symposium in Hartford, Connecticut. In September 2000, she traveled with a Clark Art Institute Program for American docents from 15 different museums to Paris, lecturing in the Musee du Louvre and the Musee D’Orsay.

Burnham is the author of the article, If You Don’t Stop, You Don’t See Anything, in the TC Record, and It’s Amazing and It’s Profound, in the anthology, Aesthetics in Perspective. Her teaching is documented in the video, Looking to Write, Writing to See, produced by the Art Institute of Chicago. At the Metropolitan, she produced You Can’t Be Wrong About Art, a video documentary in which high school students describe their experiences in the afterschool and weekend classes in the Museum. Burnham has been a panelist at many conferences, including The Observant Eye Workshop at the Feminist Art History Conference at Barnard College in 1992, Imagination and the Moral Life at Teachers College and College Visionaries at the College Art Association Annual Meeting in 1994, and Including the Visitor’s Voice and Museums in the Classrooms at the National Art Education Association in 2001. In March 1999, she presented Visible Knowledge, a lecture on art and museum education, on The John Landrum Bryant Lecture/Performance Series at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. At the National Art Education Association Convention in March 2001, Burnham received the 2001 Eastern Region Museum Education Art Educator Award.

Rika Burnham graduated from Radcliffe College/Harvard University with a BA in Art History. She was a college intern at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1973, a Metropolitan Museum Rockefeller Fellow in Museum Education 1974-1975, a recipient of by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts from 1980-1985. Burnham was a founding member in 1976 of Artists Teaching, Inc., a small not for profit arts organization devoted to the interdisciplinary experience of the arts, and from 1987-1993, served on the board of directors for the Asian American Arts Centre in New York City. From 1999-2000, she was a member of advisory boards to the education departments of the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania, and the Museum of African Art in New York.