Ann Holt

Professional Bio

Ann Holt, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of art education at Penn State and affiliate faculty of Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies (WGSS). She serves as an advisor and artist teacher with ArtsAction Group, an international community-based collective of arts educators, art therapists, artist teachers, and educators committed to facilitating arts initiatives with children and youth in conflict-affected environments. Holt's research focuses on socially-engaged, community arts and cultural practice towards social transformation as well as issues of access to archives and marginalized histories of art education. Her historical studies, "Lowenfeld at Hampton (1939 - 1946): Empowerment, Resistance, Activism, and Pedagogy" (2012) and “Mary E. Godfrey (1913-2007): Penn State’s First African American Full-Time Faculty Member” (2017), are published in Studies in Art Education. She also co-authored "Archiving a Living Curriculum: Judy Chicago, Through the Flower, and The Dinner Party" (2013) as well as presented and published her research on access, communication and pedagogy with art education archives in the Society of American Archives Research Forum (2010).

Holt is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Arts, Culture & Development which came out of a co-edited publication from Routledge UK’s Rethinking Development Series, Arts and Culture in Global Development Practice: Expression, Identity, and Empowerment. She serves on the board of the National Art Education Association (NAEA) Coalition of Feminisms in Art Education and in the role of research coordinator with a focus on amplifying emerging feminist researchers. Since 2020 to she serves as the NAEA liaison to New York State Art Teacher Association’s Equity, Diversity & Inclusion task force. From 2015 to 2017, she was Executive Director of feminist artist Linda Stein’s social justice arts non-profit, Have Art Will Travel! Inc., conducting outreach and coordinating programming for her exhibitions The Fluidity of Gender and Holocaust Heroes: Fierce Females. Since its inception in 2016, she serves on a curriculum team to expand social justice curricular opportunities around Stein’s exhibitions for the website Social Justice Art Education with Linda Stein. The curriculum team published Teaching and Assessing Social Justice Art Education: Power, Politics, and Possibilities in 2022 based on collaborative research on assessing social justice principles in teaching.

Holt’s artmaking encompasses a variety of materials and responds to her lived experience, research, and teaching. She holds a B.F.A. in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in California, USA and an M.A. in art education from Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. She completed her doctoral work in art education with a minor in women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Penn State. Her dissertation titled User Experience with Archives and Feminist Teaching Conversations with the Judy Chicago Art Education Collection explores a feminist transdisciplinary orientation to the Judy Chicago Art Education Collection and broadens understanding about engaging and encountering art education archival records.