Part Time Faculty Profiles

Ayelet is a public art and social practice curator focused on art, education and wellness. She serves as a curatorial consultant at Residency Unlimited (RU), NYC and was the lead curator for IDEAS xLab - cultivating artists as agents of change. Ayelet curated “Re:Construction” public art projects for Alliance for Downtown NY; public video art in Times Square with ZAZ10 and projects with the International Artists’ Museum at the 51st & 52nd Venice Biennales. Recent publications include Then and Now - a Harlem Renaissance curriculum guide with the Wallach Gallery at Columbia; Natchez: Inclusion and Soaps in Concinnitas: The Journal of the Institute of Arts /University of Rio de Janeiro and Seeing the Unseen in Trends - The Texas Art Education Journal. Aldouby served as the president of the NAEA Community Art Caucus (CAC), instructs Community Arts - Field work, and is currently pursuing an Ed.D. in Art Education. Ayelet is also a yoga instructor, avid hiker and photographer.  

Susan Ruth Cohen-Small is a visual artist and art educator. She has exhibited nationally, and her artwork is included in the Brooklyn Museum collection, and other institutions. Early in her career, Susan won a Jerome Foundation Emerging Artist Award, and was the recipient of a NY State Council on the Arts Workspace grant. Susan teaches Field Observations in Art Education at TC and is a Field Supervisor of Student Teachers in Art & Art Education. She is an Adjunct Professor at Adelphi University, where she teaches Creative Arts for All Learners and the Student Teaching Seminar in Art Education. Susan holds an EdM from TC, an MFA from SUNY Buffalo, where she was a Teaching Fellow in Drawing and Printmaking, and a BFA from the University of Michigan. Susan is currently pursuing her EdD at TC. Her research is concerned with the translation of art practice into art pedagogy.

Jaymes Dec is the Chair of Innovation and a technology teacher at the Marymount School of New York. After graduating from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, he served as the Program Manager at GreenFab, a National Science Foundation program for high school students from the South Bronx that taught science, technology, engineering, and math skills through classes on sustainable design and green technologies. Jaymes was named a “Teacher of the Future” by the National Association of Independent Schools and a Senior Fab Learn Fellow by Stanford University. He is the co-author of Make: Tech DIY: Easy Electronics Projects for Parents and Kids.

Aimee is currently pursuing an Ed.D.DCT in Art Education and holds an Ed.M. from Teachers College. She has a M.F.A. from SUNY New Paltz and a B.A. from Baldwin Wallace University. Aimee’s research interest involves examining the intersection of embodied learning and ceramics, and how the embodied practices of ceramics can be explored in higher education. Aimee is also interested in how the educational setting can influence art making practices and subsequent artworks. As an active artist and educator, she brings both her movement and artist practices to the classroom, where she challenges students to both experiment with the material and consider the role of the body as a tool. Aimee’s artistic individual works and installations are held in private collections and exhibited in galleries nationwide.

Jun Gao is an established artist and passionate educator who has taught art and art education for twenty years. He obtained a Doctor of Education degree in art and art education from Teachers College, Columbia University, an MA from University for the Creative Arts (Britain), an MFA from Boston University College of Fine Arts, and a BA from Tsinghua University (China). In addition to his multidisciplinary art practice, Dr. Gao teaches painting courses in the Art and Art Education Program at Teachers College and gives lectures at art schools in China. Besides serving in different advisory committees, he presented at national and international conferences and conducted workshops in world-renowned institutions, such as The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and National Art and Art Education Association. His teaching passions include painting, drawing, photography, graphic design, digital art, visual culture, art theory, and art education. Many of his artworks are collected by internationally acclaimed American and Chinese institutions and are published in various art books and periodicals.

Tara Geer makes, teaches and researches drawing. Her artwork is in many private and public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The New York Historical Society, and The Canadian Museum, and the Morgan. She’s had solo shows in LA and in NY, and exhibited at Jason McCoy, Tibor de Nagy, the Glenn Horowitz Gallery, the National Arts Club, Aran Cravey, the Four Seasons, and The Drawing Center registry --among others.  There are 2 books about her work; Carrying Silence: The Drawings of Tara Geer; and New York Studio Conversations. She is featured in 3 documentaries: Before and After Dinner, Generosity of Eye, and Sanctuary. She was awarded 2019 BlogHer Voice of the Year. She has been teaching for over 3 decades –to children with visual processing challenges, doctors at Yale, poets, museum educators, and since 2012 at TC. She was funded by the National Science Foundation, in collaboration with neuroscientists, to study Harnessing the Power of Drawing for Learning. She has a BA and MFA from Columbia University where she was given a full tuition teaching fellowship and graduated Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa. She has received the Louis Sudler Prize, the Joan Sovern prize and had residencies at MacDowell Colony. She has an upcoming solo show in NYC with Guild Gallery Fall 2022.

Mahbobe Ghods is an artist, printmaker, and researcher living and  working in New York. Mahbobe works and teaches in all processes of  printmaking and uses multiple processes in her art work. Her most  recent works combines lithography, woodblock, collage, and etching.   

Mahbobe holds an EdD in Art Education from Teachers College, an MFA  and a BA from Lehman College. Mahbobe teaches printmaking at  Teachers College, Columbia University.  

She has presented her research nationally and internationally. Dr.  Ghods is the recipient of several fellowships, grants, and awards. She has presented her research at CAA, NAEA, SIS and INSEA at the  University of Heidelberg. Her research interest is the transition and  change in the arts in advent of new media. 

Mahbobe’s prints are exhibited nationally and internationally and are in  many different collections. In 2021 Her work was named “the best work  on paper” at the Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton, New York. She has  done special edition books, artists books, published illustrated books  

Candy Alexandra González is a Little Havana-born and raised, NYC and Philadelphia-based, multidisciplinary visual artist, poet, activist, and trauma-informed art educator.

Candy received their MFA in Book Arts + Printmaking from the University of the Arts in 2017. Since graduating, they have been a 40th Street Artist-in-Residence in West Philadelphia, a West Bay View Fellow at Dieu Donné in Brooklyn, NY, Leeway Art and Change Grant Recipient and the 2021 Linda Lee Alter Fellow for the DaVinci Art Alliance. Candy is currently an Art + Art Education doctoral student at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Deren Guler is a researcher, designer, and educator based in New York. Designing accessible tools to help people re-imagine the world motivates her work. She has worked with universities, museums, and events internationally to organize and teach design and engineering workshops. She is the founder and CEO of Teknikio- a Brooklyn-based EdTech company that creates award-winning electronics and tools. She adjuncts in the Design and Technology department at Parsons School of Design and at Teachers College Columbia University, is a co-founder of the FatcatFablab makerspace, and author of Crafting Wearables: Blending Technology with Fashion.

Dr. Ami Kantawala serves as an adjunct associate professor in the Art and Art Education Program at Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York, and also teaches in Boston University’s online Master of Art Education program. She teaches a variety of courses at both universities ranging from research methods, master’s seminars, history of art education, and leadership in art education, along with supervision of Masters’ research theses. She also served as a full-time Lecturer and Program Manager in the Arts Administration Program at Teachers College from 2011-13. She completed her BFA in Painting and Metalcraft at Sir J. J. School of Applied Art in Bombay, India, and went on to complete her Ed.M. and Ed.D. in Art Education at Teachers College. She completed an extensive training program in Leadership from HERS Wellesley Institute in 2012-13. She was awarded the Eastern Region Higher Art Educator of the Year from the National Art Education Association. Dr. Kantawala was elected to be the incoming senior editor (beginning March 2020) for one of the field’s bonafide peer-reviewed journal Art Education (published by NAEA and ranked fourth in the world in art education).

At Teachers College, Dr. Kantawala has pioneered coursework on the History of Art Education through a unique visual studies lens. She has designed two online courses on “Insightful and Creative Leadership within Arts Education” and “Master’s Research Project” for Boston University’s online master’s program. These courses acquaint and prepare in-service art teachers with the basic research skills and organizational strategies of leadership and management that are needed to serve within school systems and arts educational organizations, specifically museums and community art centers. The research course introduces students to the conventions and practice of qualitative research in the context of art education and as a form of inquiry that is grounded in the theories, practices, and contexts used by art practitioners working in schools, museums, community agencies, etc. which aids in strengthening and informing the students’ practice.

Her research intersects historical methods, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, higher education leadership, qualitative research, and mentoring. She has published articles in research journals such as Visual Arts Research, Studies in Art Education, and the International Journal of Art and Design Education. Dr. Kantawala also serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Visual Inquiry: Learning and Teaching Art, Studies in Art Education, Journal of Social Theory in Art Education (both journals published by the National Art Education Association (NAEA), and Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education. She has served as the co-chair of the brain trust on historical research methods in Art Education for the Higher Education Division Research Steering Committee, and recently served as the Eastern Region Director of the Higher Education Division for NAEA. She has also presented at several NAEA, AERA (American Education Research Association), HES (History of Education Society) and CAA (College Art Association) conferences on historical research, mentoring, new faculty development, international histories, research methods, undocumented histories of art education and art education in India.

Thomas W. Lollar is a master sculptor who creates works in ceramic, marble, and metal and reimagines architectural, geographical, and historical narratives. His broad range of subjects are rendered in both frontal bas-relief and aerial views. The unique surface colors with which the works are finished are the result of a unique combination of media that arises from applying copper, bronze, and platinum metallic paints and glazes.

Joy Moser: The arts in education pervades all my teaching and research. As a painter and educator, I continue to try to communicate the role of visual culture—through philosophy, theory and direct experience with the multiple art forms in our contemporary society.

My life as a painter began in the late 1950s when abstraction was “The only game in town”. I followed and progressed through gesture, organic and finally, geometric non-objective painting.

The radical move for me was to discover that the real world of landscape lurked behind all that past work. My childhood in the mountains of Pennsylvania pervaded my “way of seeing” and I wanted to investigate and celebrate the infinite variety of tone, color and composition that I found around me.

Sky, the structure of trees, mist and water appeared to fill a hunger to look again and again. There was mystery and danger lurking behind the beauty, and my aim was to try to avoid the cliché and explore the infinite structure of the visual landscape.

Now I use my camera as a sketchbook and search for images that seem to offer odd structure and “mystery”. I shoot multiple points of view, cull, crop, and mostly discard. The surviving photographs become the catalyst for the paintings and the process is always a mediation between memory and the small image pinned to my easel.

Carolina Rojas is a Colombian artist-educator and designer based in New York. Rojas’s artistic practice explores life-death dichotomies and human-nonhuman-animal relationships through drawings, assemblages, and installations. Inspired by Victorian-era curiosities, she integrates nonhuman animal themes and conservation, bridging art, education, and natural sciences. Her contributions to pedagogy and art have been presented and exhibited individually and collectively worldwide. Currently, her work is part of Sketch Gallery.

Rojas is a doctoral Fulbright grantee pursuing an Ed.D.CT. in Art and Art Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she is an adjunct faculty and design fellow. Previously, she was an assistant professor at Universidad de Los Andes’ School of Design in Bogotá. She has taught courses including Professional Practice for Artists, Advanced Studio, Design for Educators, Graphic and Editorial Design, Illustration, Drawing, and Digital Imaging. Additionally, she has advised thesis projects at both undergraduate and master levels. Alongside her educational and artistic endeavors, Rojas has undertaken various illustration, editorial, and graphic design projects for artistic and educational institutions. She is also the author of Ilustrados Collection of Fanzines (Ediciones Uniandes, 2015).

Rojas holds an M.F.A. in Digital Arts from Pratt Institute, a Specialist Degree in Design and Television Production from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, and a B.A. in Electronic Media and Time Arts from Universidad de Los Andes.

Lisa Jo Sagolla is an arts educator, consultant, critic, choreographer, and historian, whose research interests revolve around the making, history, and teaching of integrated arts genre, such as the Broadway musical, physical theatre, and various forms of American popular culture and entertainment. Her first book, The Girl Who Fell Down: A Biography of Joan McCracken (Northeastern University Press), was a finalist for the Theatre Library Association’s George Freedley Memorial Award for best book in the area of theatre or live performance. Her second book, Rock ‘n’ Roll Dances of the 1950s (Greenwood Press/ABC-CLIO), is part of the social-history, reference book series “The American Dance Floor.” Sagolla has written book chapters, scholarly journal articles, and encyclopedia entries on topics ranging from Busby Berkeley to Twyla Tharp, tap dance, the Rockettes, and the influence of modern dance on American musical theatre choreography. Her writings appear in American National Biography; The International Dictionary of Modern Dance; The St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture; The Back-Stage Actor’s Handbook; Frank Sinatra: The Man, The Music, and the Legend; Italian-American Politics: Local, Global/Cultural, Personal; and The Italian American Experience: An Encyclopedia. She has also written more than 600 arts reviews for trade and popular periodicals including Backstage Magazine (for which she was the Dance/Movement columnist for 8 years), Playbill, American Theatre, Dance Teacher, Pointe, Film Journal International, and The Bucks County Herald. Sagolla has choreographed more than 75 productions for Off-Broadway, regional, summer stock, and university theatres and has taught in K-12, studio, and college settings, including Columbia University, New York University, and Marymount Manhattan College. She has served as an arts education assessment and curriculum development consultant for the Lincoln Center Institute, New York City Ballet, Dance Theatre of Harlem, and Chicago Moving Company, and as an Educative Teacher Performance Assessment scorer for Pearson.

David Sheinkopf is a creative technologist with a background in education and arts administration. His skill set and body of work is diverse-- designing and building custom electronics for the world’s biggest brands, developing curriculum for students (from age 9 to 60), and creating public programming at the intersection of arts and technology. In 2015, Sheinkopf co-founded Smooth Technology, an experiential production studio that designs, builds and implements specialized technology solutions. There, he has been responsible for carrying projects from conception to completion for clients ranging from multinational corporations (Cisco Systems, Google) to pop stars (Taylor Swift, Mariah Carey). Previously, Sheinkopf established and directed the education and technology departments at Pioneer Works, a Brooklyn-based arts and science nonprofit. Over his six year tenure, he managed a wide-range of artists, courses, students, teachers and curricula. He also created public programming and events that still occur annually, including a 3D-printed boat race (The Red Hook Regatta), a hackathon (Hack Red Hook), creative technology conference (Software for Artists Day), and an education collaboration with Google (Art x Code). David has also spent over a decade in the classroom, teaching at The Churchill School in Manhattan. There, he developed a curriculum for teaching analog and digital electronics to high school students, preparing them for life in an increasingly computerized world. He continues to teach VR and Physical Computing at Teachers College, Columbia University.

When not teaching, building, or programming, you can find David fixing bicycles, composing music, or barbecuing for his friends and family.

Sharon Vatsky supervised school, youth, teacher, and family programs at the Guggenheim Museum for twenty years, leaving that position in 2021. From 1990 to 2000 she served as Curator of Education at the Queens Museum where she formulated programming for dozens of exhibitions of modern and contemporary art.

Vatsky teaches graduate courses in museum education at New York University and Teachers College, Columbia University, and has taught college level courses in drawing, design, art history, and arts education. She holds graduate degrees from the State University of New York at Albany and Hartford Art School, as well as an undergraduate degree from New York University. She is the author of Museum Gallery Experiences: A Handbook (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield / American Alliance of Museums, 2018), and is working on a second book focusing on gallery and virtual museum teaching.

Erika Vogt is a sculptor who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.   Vogt’s sculptures have taken the form of installations and collaborative theatrical performances.   She works materially across mediums including time.  Past institutional solo exhibitions have included the New Museum in New York, the Hepworth Wakefield in West Yorkshire, and Triangle France in Marseille.  Her work has been exhibited and screened at institutions including Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hammer Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, and REDCAT.  Theatrical commissions include The Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2014 and Performa in New York City in 2015.  

For over two decades, E.Y. Zipris has studied, worked in, lectured, and written about museums. Formerly the Director of Education at the Museum of the City of New York, E.Y. is thrilled to be back at Teachers College where she earned her EdM in Art Education and Museum Studies. In addition, E.Y. has an MA in Museum Anthropology from Columbia University. E.Y.'s course, Museum Experiences Across Disciplines, highlights education within cultural institutions as a means for transforming museum culture from the inside out. One of E.Y.’s proudest achievements is founding the Teaching Social Activism Conference at the Museum of the City of New York. She lives in the Upper West Side with her husband and daughter. Or as she likes to think of them, her built in museum buddies. E.Y. loves engaging with her students both in and out of the classroom and welcomes anyone with an interest in museology to be in touch!

Queena Ko is the Director of Education at The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum. During her tenure, she has advocated for teaching practices centered on anti-bias and anti-racist frameworks to empower audiences of all ages to share diverse perspectives. Prior to joining The Noguchi Museum, Queena was Manager of Academic Engagement at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and has led education programs at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, The Getty Center, and Hammer Museum. Queena is passionate about increasing access and community engagement within museum work. Her writing has been published in Teaching Modern and Contemporary Asian Art (Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2020) and Creating Meaningful Museum Experiences for K–12 Audiences: How to Connect with Teachers and Engage with Students (Rowman & Littlefield / American Alliance of Museums, 2021).