I grew up in Brazil, attended Indiana University in Bloomington for five years, and received my Ph.D. I have been at the University of Cincinnati since 2000, becoming a full professor in 2014. My experiences at UC in teaching, research, and leadership have provided me with a platform to explore local, international, and global influences in art education theory and practice. From the completion of my doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction at Indiana University in 1999 to the present, my research and practice embody a commitment to building transformative connections between art education and communities. My publications, editorial work, public speaking, teaching, and leadership are aligned with a socially responsible orientation to art and education. This view is based on contemporary understandings of community, culture, and art that are informed by transformative educational models.

Before beginning my academic career, I worked in my hometown of Porto Alegre, Brazil, as an elementary school teacher. My students were of various ethnic, social-economic, and cultural backgrounds, and attended both elite private schools and public schools. My early years as a teacher at the university level and my current academic career both reflect a commitment to promote equitable, meaningful, and transformative educational practices that are rooted in artistic experiences. While my academic experiences are located within the domain of visual arts education, my background in dance and early professional experiences in literacy education also shape my research and practice, focusing my interest on a research agenda that seeks to develop approaches that make the arts more democratic and accessible to all learners. These early professional experiences in a developing world context, along with my identity as an immigrant scholar, firmly shape my desire to engage in activist academic work that is informed by theory, grounded in local communities, and measured by its ability to have a positive impact.

My work as an academic and engaged citizen strives to advance understandings and communication of the role of arts and creative pedagogy in emancipatory education, as well as the possibilities of art and creativity in shaping more equitable and inclusive academic research practices.

Values

My commitment to diversity, inclusion, and equity informs my professional career in significant ways. As an individual, my outlook on these issues was shaped by formative experiences within my family, as bi-racial child growing up in Brazil. As a professional, my developing awareness of how to advance diversity and inclusion goals through education started with my training in the United States. Informed by transparent and activist language about racism and prejudice, inspired by the experiences and examples of civil-rights activist colleagues, and challenged by transformative approaches such as critical race theory, my work explicitly promotes more equitable, inclusive, and ultimately transformational teaching and research. In my writing I articulate how diversity can lead to equity:

I am moved by the proposition that education is a vehicle of social transformation. I am first generation college-educated, of a mixed-race background, non-American from a developing country, not a native speaker of English. I taught kids who did not have shoes, let alone textbooks, and kids who lived in gated communities and came to school in chauffeured import cars. Through my personal and teaching experiences with elementary grades in both public and private schools in Brazil, as well as my current academic work in the United States, I contemplated the breath of the social gap, and witnessed the transformative power of learning. This transformative work is personal; it is based on constant evolving reflection about our own instances of oppression and privilege, as much as that of our students’ (Bastos, 2010, p.3).

DAAP artists paint hope in the streets with Black Lives Matter mural

Within two days, teams of painters turned black pavement into a display of bright red, green and black color and form — portraying poignant reflections of a past that should have never been and new messages of hope, equality and social justice.