Alumni

Alumni

Sydney Golden Anderson (MA 2021)

What are you currently working on?
Since completing the MAAE program, I've had the incredible privilege to co-author and publish a book titled, Birding for a Better World: The Feminist Bird Club Guide for Finding Joy and Community in Nature (fall 2023), which aims to provide pathways for connection, reciprocity, and responsibility toward one another and local ecosystems. I have also recently accepted a full-time, remote position with the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) as the Senior Community Habitat Coordinator. It is a great honor to support NWF’s partners on a national scale as they implement equity-centered conservation programming and cultivate biodiversity habitats within their cities, communities, and neighborhoods. 

How did SAIC’s Art Education Department affect your practice?
My studies at SAIC humbled me. My professors and mentors taught me how to listen with patience and authenticity, and about the importance of cultivating slow and intentional relation-based programming. They taught me about fractalized engagement, connection, and change— that starting small and spiraling outward is how we’ll have the greatest impact. The MAAE program encouraged me (and everyone else) to push the boundaries of traditional art education, and as a result, gifted me the creative freedom to incorporate my background earth-studies into my current and future scholarship. The two years I spent with my MAAE family shaped who I am today, and will continue to impact my work forever! 

Catherine Barry (MA 2022)

Where are you currently doing work?
In August of 2022, I began working as an Art Teacher at Chicago Excel Academy of Rosedale on the south side of Chicago. Chicago Excel Academy is an accelerated high school that serves students who either need to obtain credits or are behind in credits to graduate. All students receive a CPS graduation certificate. The school is run by a private company but is associated with CPS guidelines. Many of the issues students face are attendance, home life, legal issues, arrests, home monitoring, probation, pregnancy, abuse of all kinds, neighborhood and home violence, and lack of support at home. 

How did SAIC’s Art Education Department affect your practice?
I returned to SAIC in the fall of 2020. I graduated with a BFA in 1990 from SAIC, so I had not been in school for 30 years. I learned many things in my two years as an MAAE student. The most important may be insignificant to other students, but I learned how to present ideas, technical presentations, the framework of current issues, what is currently being done in art education, and the needs associated with them. Without this opportunity, I would have been ill-prepared for the position I am currently working in if qualified at all. I am so thankful for the relationships I was able to build with my peers and professors. These relationships sustained confidence and career-building opportunities I truly value.

Jackie Guataquira (MA 2021)

What are you currently working on?
I'm an Instructional Facilitator over at Henry Clay Elementary School on the far South Side of the city, where I facilitate programming for girls in grades K-6. We also involve ourselves outside of the schools and in the communities we work within. 

Recently, I took my 5th grade class to the National Museum of Mexican Art to see the annual Día de Muertos exhibition. Since the neighborhood is very far from the center of the city, it’s not often that the students at Clay get to venture out of the neighborhood, especially since CTA is sparse, the last L red line stop being at 95th and the school being on 132nd.

I was excited to have planned this field trip to give them an opportunity to explore more of the city that not all have been to, and experience a beautiful exhibition highlighting a holiday some already celebrate and for others, offering insight into traditions of their classmates.

How did SAIC’s Art Education Department affect your practice?
My time at SAIC has really positively influence where I am now professionally. Though my position isn’t explicitly an art education role, I bring my creative expertise to the forefront of the lessons I develop and facilitate. 

Nika Gorini (MA 2020)

For the past 10 years I have been working as an art administrator and educator in Creative Youth Development (CYD) spaces. CYD is a sector of community arts education that merges high quality creative skill development with positive youth development principles. Before coming to SAIC I was the Program Director for Providence CityArts for Youth, a nonprofit organization that provides free, multidisciplinary arts education to young people in Providence, RI.

In the summer of 2017 I worked with a small cohort of teaching artists and young artists to refine and define CityArts’ positive youth development and social justice arts education practices. We developed the CityArts Social Justice Approach, based on Bree Picower’s writing. The approach included four distinct stages of social justice arts education: Self Love and Knowledge, Respect for Others, Questioning/Connecting/Reflecting, and Creating Social Action.

I am currently working as the Assistant Dean of Continuing Studies for Academics here at SAIC. I work closely with the faculty and the program design of the school's adult and youth programs. The aspect of my work that I love the most is running the College Arts Access Program, a college bridge program for Chicago Public School students who are passionate about the arts.

At SAIC was exposed to mentors, colleagues, and collaborators who pushed, questioned, and also validated my understanding of art education. Before arriving at SAIC, I had been working for years in small nonprofits, where there was no time to sit back, reflect and develop a strong analysis around the pedagogies and theories that were driving my work. In the MAAE program, I was introduced to new ideas, gained a deeper understanding and confidence around old ideas, and began to develop ideas of my own. My time as a student prepared me to lead with a sense of confidence that is rooted in experience and a strong community in the art education field.  

My thesis work was designed to take part in a national CYD field building project that was taking place at the time.

I examined the ways in which power dynamics in CYD spaces do or do not reflect the social justice based values that the field tends to claim. Specifically, I examined how ‘Youth Voice’ is defined and implemented in CYD. This project questioned adultism in arts education, and asked: How are young people’s perspectives, passions and goals centered in CYD classrooms? Do their creative visions and perspectives take precedence over an artistic ‘rigor’ that has historically been defined by whiteness?

I began to work with the Continuing Studies department while I was an MAAE student. It was through the connections that I developed during my graduate program that I was able to find full-time employment in an exciting and engaging position during the pandemic. 

Ishita Dharap (MA 2020)

I recently worked with artist Aram Han Sifuentes on a project titled Taking Receipts: A Log of Aggression for People of Color, which I designed and illustrated. This logbook is intended to be a cute, colorful and harmless looking 'diary', with prompts on every page to meticulously record instances of microaggression. This was an important project for me, both as a way to start acknowledging my own privilege in the place I grew up and to start understanding what it meant to be a brown body in the US.

In 2018, before I knew I was admitted into the SAIC Master of Arts in Art Education Program, I was chosen to be a part of a nineteen-people group show titled The Art of Being Dangerous at the Hyde Park Art Center, where I made my first work after moving to this country. Emptiness for Empty Time is an ode to the first year-and-a-half I spent in Chicago, moving slowly through endless and lonely days. I made approximately 60 tiny paper sculptures using printed material I had slowly gathered in this city, this country: other people's art show invites, printed ads, even chopstick wrappers and moving boxes. The result (pictured here) was a forest of invisible wires from floor to ceiling, and the almost floating sculptures frozen in time, or just thawing, swaying gently.

Having access to the Art Institute of Chicago has been momentous; it is the reason I chose to pursue museum studies in my second semester, followed by a summer internship with the Pulitzer Arts Foundation's Public Programs and Engagement department.

I recently worked with artist Aram Han Sifuentes on a project titled Taking Receipts: A Log of Aggression for People of Color, which I designed and illustrated. This logbook is intended to be a cute, colorful and harmless looking 'diary', with prompts on every page to meticulously record instances of microaggression. This was an important project for me, both as a way to start acknowledging my own privilege in the place I grew up and to start understanding what it meant to be a brown body in the US.

Video Profiles

Christine Bespalec Davis

Joel Javier

Alvaro Amat