Jordan Crosby is Director of EPLC’s Arts and Education Initiative (AEI). Diverse groups of stakeholders from around the state she has organized are investigating during 2011 the role of the arts in Pennsylvania’s schools and communities and how public policy can best support the learning opportunities the arts afford to all Pennsylvanians. This work will culminate in the release of a report containing recommendations for state policymakers and other groups, as well as an advocacy campaign during 2012.
Before joining EPLC on a full-time basis in June 2010, at which time Crosby was an adjunct professor and a consultant building EPLC’s Pennsylvania Education Advocacy Network (PEAN), she worked for five years at Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, most recently as the head of school and teacher programming in the education department. There she designed project-based learning experiences for students and teachers that reflected her passion for creative methods of artistic response. The Pennsylvania Art Education Association named her “Outstanding Museum Educator of the Year” in 2009 in the wake of her work on Life on Mars, the 55th Carnegie International.
An art historian and museum educator from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Crosby has taught learners of all ages in secondary and postsecondary classrooms, galleries, and museums in Pennsylvania, California, and France. She graduated magna cum laude in 2001 with a BA in Art History and French from Hamilton College in New York, at which point she was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa Society. At the University of California, Davis, where she was awarded a fellowship and received her MA in Art History, she studied the cultural history of art museums and developed her thesis on the reception aesthetics of the American painter Milton Avery.
Visit www.aei-pa.org for more information about EPLC’s Arts and Education Initiative.
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