Past ART CART Faculty

Joan Jeffri is the founder and director of the Research Center for Arts and Culture at the National Center for Creative Aging, and the past Director of the Program in Arts Administration at Teachers College Columbia University. She is the past president of the Association of Art Administration Educators. From 1981-1990, she served as an executive director of The Journal of Arts Management and Law. She is author of Respect for Art: Arts Management and Administration in China and the united States (2007);  Arts Money: Raising It, Saving It, Earning It (1989); The Emerging Arts: Management, Survival and Growth (1990), ABOVE GROUND (2007) and STILL KICKING (2011), two studies of aging professional artists, and editor of Artisthelp: The Artist’s Guide to Work-Related Human and Social Services (1990); and The Actor Speaks, The Painter Speaks, and The Craftsperson Speaks (Greenwood Press, 1994, 1993, 1992), as well as numerous studies on artists, including “Information on Artists I and II” and “The Artists Training and Career Project.” Her first careers were as a poet, with Louis Untermeyer as her mentor, and an actress, appearing in the national tour of The Homecoming, in the Boston Company of The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds and with the Lincoln Center Repertory Company in New York City.

Judith M. Burton is Professor of Art and Art Education, Department of Arts and Humanities. Dr. Burton came to the United States from Great Britain in 1974; she taught in the Newton Public Schools and at the Massachusetts College of Art. She completed her doctoral work at Harvard University while chairing the Art Education Program at Boston University. In 1990 she was invited to direct the Program in Art and Art Education at Columbia University Teachers College and more recently served as Chairperson of the newly created Department of the Arts and Humanities. Dr. Burton’s research focuses on the contribution of the arts to human growth and development; her publications include a series of articles entitled “Developing Minds” which has become standard reading in art education. In 2001, Dr. Burton was honored by The National Art Education Association with the prestigious Viktor Lowenfeld Award for her contribution to the profession of art education. She has also been invited by the publishers Prentice Hall, to revise Lowenfeld”s famous text Creative and Mental Growth which is widely read in art and psychology programs around the world. In 1994 Dr Burton co-founded the Center for Research in Arts Education at Teachers College. The Center has carried out a number of assessment studies looking at the impact on learning of school/arts organization collaborations. In 1997 she was awarded a grant from the GE/McArthur Foundations to study the impact of learning in and through the arts on student learning across the curriculum. This work was originally published in the Report Champions of Change, and a fuller version was recently published in Studies in Art Education. For this paper “Learning in and Through the Arts: the Question of Transfer” Dr. Burton and her colleagues were honored in 2001 by the National Art Education Association with the Manuel Barkan Award. In 1997, Dr. Burton was the inspiration behind the founding of the Heritage School, a comprehensive high school located in East Harlem. The School, a partnership between Teachers College and the New York City Board of Education includes the arts as part of the core curriculum. The School also features work in museums and other types of cultural institutions as central to interdisciplinary learning. Now in its forth year, and still in the making, the Heritage School, is rapidly offering a leadership model to other schools in the City. Dr. Burton is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in Great Britain, and trustee of the Haystack Mountain School for Craft in Maine.

Janet Falk-Kessler, Ed.D., OTR, FAOTA is the Director and Associate Professor, Programs in Occupational Therapy and an Honorary Adjunct Associate Professor of Movement Sciences and Education, Teachers College. She has a strong clinical experience with individuals who have chronic psychiatric disorders; clinical administration experience of day hospital and occupational therapy departments; consultation to community agencies serving those with chronic mental illness; and school system intervention. She is particularly interested in outcome measures related to cognitive impairment, and how it affects function in a variety of populations; and coping strategies in a variety of populations. Fellow of the American Occupational Therapy Association. Falk-Kessler is the Editor of Education Corner: Occupational Therapy in Health Care, a past editorial board member of the American Journal of Occupational Therapy. She is active in a variety of committees of the American Occupational Therapy Association.

Patricia A. Miller, EdD, OTR, FAOTA, is a Special Research Scientist for the Programs in Occupational Therapy. Her clinical expertise is in primary and secondary prevention with older adults, assessment and treatment of depression and dementia, fall prevention, program development in community agencies, consultation to practitioners and family members, interdisciplinary teamwork. Her research interests include fall prevention, preventing functional decline and dependency in older adults, health promotion, distinguishing between depression and dementia in older adults, promoting self-efficacy, stages of change model, leadership perspectives of occupational therapy educators and clinicians. She is the Principal Investigator for Facilitating Change to Promote Health in Older Adults: An Interdisciplinary Program in Internal Medicine and Occupational Therapy. Garvey Teaching Academy Award, Columbia University. (2007-2009) and the Director of Occupational Therapy Service–Learning in a community agency serving older adults Jarvie Commonweal Services (2004-present). Miller has received a number of awards including; Service Award, Gerontology Special Interest Section Advisory Council, American OT Association, Gerontology Curriculum Development Award, Brookdale Institute on Aging & Adult Human Development, Columbia University.

Victoria Raveis‘ research focuses on the psychosocial issues facing seriously ill or dying adults and the health-related demands and challenges confronting families. Her work has documented the diversity and contributions of the family caring unit, addressed grief and bereavement throughout the life course, and informed the development of resources and programs to address families’ psychosocial needs. She has also published on the role of psychosocial factors in treatment compliance, barriers to health services and end-of-life care in medically underserved populations and attitudes towards medical care in ethnically diverse populations. Dr. Raveis has lectured and presented her work at national and international conferences and has authored numerous publications. Her research is contributing to the growing awareness, on a national leadership level, of the importance of focusing attention on the aging family and providing resources to the family caring unit. She is part of a national panel of experts, convened by the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Human Development on care provision in cancer. Dr. Raveis is also a member of a national advisory group, convened by National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Information Service, to develop evidence-based materials for NCI’s Facing Forward series that addresses the challenges families face during cancer survivorship. She has been the principal investigator on research grants from national and several state and foundation efforts. In addition to her research activities, Dr. Raveis directs the MPH program on Aging and Public Health, located within the School’s Department of Sociomedical Sciences.

Liza Zapol is a Documentary Producer and an Oral Historian. She creates sound, multimedia and performance on the themes of memory and place, using documentary methods. Liza is the Community Programs Fellow at the Whitney Museum, and also leads the oral history project at Skowhegan. Liza has created live performance events and audio materials for the Metropolitan Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, The Rubin Museum, The Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and collaborated on theater performances with Elevator Repair Service Company. Liza is Co-Artistic Director of the True Body Project NYC, creating interview-based artistic installations. Liza was founding artistic director of the Combustibles, a physical theater company.

Liza has lectured at the New School Memory Conference (“The Museum as Ventriloquist: Oral History in the 9/11 Memorial Museum”), the NYCMER Conference (“Story, Memory, Fantasy: How to Gather Visitors’ Narratives and What to do Once You’ve Got Them”), and Columbia University (“Stores of Memory”). Liza was a teaching artist for five years, leading teacher workshops on theater and oral history in the classroom, with LeAp. She earned a certificate in Physical Theatre from the London International School of Performing Arts, and a certificate from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. B.A. with Honors from Northwestern University. M.A. in Oral History from Columbia University.

Liza has received grants from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Fractured Atlas, the Puffin Foundation, the Arvon Foundation, and the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts. Her work at the Whitney Museum is funded by the Altman Foundation.

Dan Kerr is an assistant professor in the department of history at American University.  He recently publishedDerelict Paradise: Homelessness and Urban Developmentin Cleveland, Ohio where he seeks answers to the question, “Who benefits from homelessness?”  Kerr is currently working on a manuscript addressing the research he conducted with the Cleveland Homeless Oral History Project where he has interviewed close to 200 homeless people. From 2005-2011, Kerr taught at James Madison University and directed the Shenandoah Valley Oral History Project. Kerr specializes in the fields of environmental history, urban social history, community history, oral history, and public history. He has an MA and Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University and a BA from Carleton College.

Sherburne Laughlin is the Director of the Arts Management Program and Professorial Lecturer at American University. Ms. Laughlin holds an MBA from Yale University, an Executive Leadership Certificate in Nonprofit Management from Harvard University and is a cum laude graduate in economics from Davidson College.  Her nonprofit management career spans over 20 years of executive director and program director experience. As a professor for 13 years at American University, she has developed top-ranked courses in Strategic Planning, Fundraising, and Boards and Governance.  Her prior consulting work focuses on issues of governance, organizational development and strategic planning and serves all types of nonprofits, arts and non-arts, large and small, national and local.  Laughlin also managed and provided training and consulting services for a large NEA/Maryland State Arts Council Advancement Grant in the late 1990s and worked with hundreds of small to mid-size arts organizations in Maryland to improve their capacity. She has served on many arts grants panels, including the Montgomery County and Fairfax County Arts Council, the DC Commission for the Arts and Humanities and the national VSA arts panel.  Having previously served on numerous boards, Laughlin is currently a member of the Advisory Board of Round House Theater and sits on the Board of Trustees of Davidson College.  Laughlin is the Academic Director of ART CART, an innovative initiative to archive the work of aging visual artists. She is a member of ArtTable and served as the Chair of the Association of Arts Administrators Conference in 2010. Professor Laughlin is currently on that association’s committee to review Graduate Standards in Arts Management. She is a long-distance swimmer, avid reader, and mother of two active sons.

Pamela Harris Lawton holds an EdDCT in Art Education, Teachers College, ColumbiaUniversity, an MFA in Printmaking, Howard University and a BA in Studio Art/Sociology, University of Virginia. She is the Director of Education Studies at the Corcoran College of Art & Design. Previously she directed the art education program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, taught art education courses at the Tyler School of Art, and advised and mentored master’s degree students in the Supervision and Administration in the Visual Arts program at the Bank Street College of Education.  A native of Washington, D.C. and product of DC public schools she is a fifth generation educator in the Washington, D.C. area. Lawton is a practicing artist whose artistic and scholarly research revolves around visual narrative and intergenerational arts learning in community settings.  Her artworks are in several collections including: the College of Health and Human Services, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Teachers College, Columbia University, Northwestern University, Morgan State University, Georgetown University, The Corcoran Gallery, the Frederick Douglass Museum and Cultural Center and the Washington, D.C. Superior Court.  In addition to publishing a monograph on her dissertation research, Artstories: Narrative Construction in Intergenerational and Transformative Learning (2008) she has published several book chapters and journal articles and serves on the review board for the Art Education journal.

The Corcoran College of Art & Design awarded Lawton an artist’s residency in their Study Away program in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, January/June 2012. In 2010 students awarded her the annual Betty Foster Outstanding Educator Award.  In 2009 she received a faculty development grant to pursue scholarly and artistic research recording the lives of aging artist/educators, the project, Artstories: In Their Own Words is ongoing.

Lawton has served as a Public Art Commissioner for Charlotte, NC (2006-09) and as the President for the Lifelong Learning Issues Group of the National Art Education Association (2009-11).  She is a member of Kappa Delta Pi International Honor Society for Education, the National Art Education Association and Delta Sigma Theta Sorority.  She has presented papers on intergenerational art education for the past ten years at the national NAEA conferences and completed a one-week residency at the Oxford Roundtable at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University where she presented and later published her paper, Balancing Act: Bridging the traditional and technological aspects of culture through art education.