2025 Conversations Across Cultures Symposium

Max Frieder, Ed.D., is the Chief Creative Officer and Co-Founder of the international community-based public arts education organization Artolution. He is a public artist and community arts educator from Denver, Colorado who is based out of Brooklyn, New York. His work ranges from community building in refugee camps, art education in emergencies, hospital workshops, abuse and addiction support through art, resilience building, social cohesion and conflict resolution. He is a trans-disciplinary artist, sculptor, puppeteer, teacher, researcher and facilitates collaborative mural programs that address critical local issues with children, youth and families. He has worked with hundreds of communities in different contexts across the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, Europe, North America and Asia. He created the “Foundstrument Soundstrument Project”, building large-scale interactive percussive sculptures out of trash and recycled materials around the world. He graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with honors and a degree in Painting and received his Master of Education in “Community Arts” in Art and Art Education from the Teachers College, Columbia University where he published a five-year body of research through his Doctor of Education titled “ The Rohingya Artolution: Teaching Locally Led Community-based Public Art Educators in the Largest Refugee Camp in History”.

His projects have taken him from Syrian, South Sudanese, Palestinian, and Greek refugee camps to conflict zones, traumatized communities, and across borders to over 26 countries globally. He has received recognition from the New York Times, CBS, NBC, Forbes and the Associated Press. He planted the seed for the first ongoing public arts program for Rohingya artists in the largest refugee camp in the world, in Bangladesh on the border of Myanmar. He is a published author contributing to “Art Making with Refugees and Survivors: Transformative Responses to Trauma after Natural Disasters, War and Other Crises”, as well as publishing with Global Citizen. For his global work, he was awarded the International Crisis Award from UNICEF and the World of Children. He has curated retrospective exhibitions of Global Refugee Art Works in the World Trade Center, UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, COP27, and the UNHCR Headquarters in Geneva. His ranging work focuses on cultivating ongoing programs by educating local artists globally on how to transform communities through public engagement, creative facilitation and inspired participation as the next phase in the history of the arts.

Pamela Lawton was born into a family of artists, writers, dancers, singers, actors, and musicians. As a fifth-generation educator from Washington, DC, she spent much of her formative years engaged in the arts with her grandmother, great uncles and aunts, cousins, parents, and siblings as a form of learning about the world and how to survive and thrive as a woman of color. These intergenerational arts-based lessons stayed with her. 

Her scholarly and artistic research revolves around visual narrative and intergenerational arts learning in community settings with specific emphasis on BIPOC communities. As an artist-educator-researcher, Lawton’s artwork is grounded in social practice, seeking to illuminate contemporary issues, cultural traditions, and the stories of people impacted by them. She earned a BA degree in Studio Art and Sociology from the University of Virginia, an MFA in Printmaking from Howard University and attended Teachers College, Columbia University where she obtained her EdDCTA (Doctor of Education in the College Teaching of Art). In 2021 Pam received the The Pearl Greenberg Award for Teaching and Research in Lifelong Learning from the National Art Education Association.  

Megan Laverty received her Master of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Melbourne and her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of New South Wales. She taught in the Philosophy Department at the University of Melbourne before starting as Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Foundations at Montclair State University (MSU) in 2000. Megan Laverty arrived at Teachers College in 2005.

Megan Laverty's primary research interests are the history of philosophy of education, moral philosophy and its significance for education, and pre-college philosophy of education. She is co-editor with Professor David T. Hansen of the five-volume reference series, A History of Western Philosophy of Education (Bloomsbury, 2021). Together with Maughn Rollins Gregory, she edits the Philosophy for Children Founders Series (Routledge). She and Rene V. Arcilla edit the Philosophies of Education in Art, Cinema, and Literature (Bloomsbury).

Anna Kornbluh's research and teaching interests center on the novel, film, and cultural aesthetics in theoretical perspective, including formalist, marxist, and psychoanalytic approaches.  She is the author of Immediacy, Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso 2024), The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (University of Chicago 2019),  Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club (Bloomsbury "Film Theory in Practice” series, 2019), and Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (Fordham UP 2014).  Essays on climate aesthetics, tv, academic labor, and psychoanalysis have appeared in venues like The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, Diacritics, Differences, and Portable Gray.  She is a member of the UIC United Faculty bargaining team and the editorial boards of Novel, Mediations, Genre, and Parapraxis, as well as the founding facilitator of InterCcECT (The Inter Chicago Circle for Experimental Critical Theory), and a partner in Humanitiesworks.org.