Art Education Graduate Students Win National and Penn State Honors

Congratulations to the following Art Education graduate students who recently won national and Penn State honors:

Indira Bailey, dual-titled Art Education and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Ph.D. candidate, has received two awards: the Caucus of Social Theory in Art Education Art Teacher SOCIAL THEORY-in-PRACTICE Award for the $300 travel stipend to the National Art Education Association (NAEA) convention in Seattle, and a Penn State Africana Research Center Award to travel to and interview women artists and art educators in Ghana in March 2018.

Asavari Thatte ('17 Ph.D. Art Ed) is the runner-up for the 2018 Elliot Eisner Doctoral Research Award. This prestigious award, determined through a peer review of nominations, recognizes the value of doctoral research to the profession of art education and its related disciplines, to advocate on behalf of such research, and to foster continued support of dissertation. The award was presented at the NAEA National Convention in Seattle, WA, March 22-24, 2018.

Art Education Ph.D. candidate Felix Rodriguez has received three awards: 2018 Penn State Alumni Association Dissertation Award; Inter-University Program for Latino Research (IUPLR)-Mellon Fellowship; and a research grant by CUNY (City University of New York) to use its Dominican Studies Archive.

Zena Kirby, a student in the Art Education Master of Professional Studies program through the World Campus, is the recipient of the Penn State Professional Master's Excellence Award, which recognizes individual student excellence in a professional master's degree program under the Graduate School, in any discipline, based upon the student's academic record in the graduate program and the quality and impact of the student's culminating experience. Four $2,500 awards are given each year to students in resident and online professional master's degree programs. She will be recognized at the Graduate Student Awards Luncheon on Wednesday, April 25, 2018.

The following students received Penn State Global Programs Graduate Student Travel Grants:

• Min Gu, Ph. D. candidate, received $750 to travel to Finland in June, for the 2018 European Regional International Society for Education Through Art Congress to present "Beyond Binaries: When Artists with Disabilities Experiment with Ink, Brush, Water, and Xuan Paper."
• Ciara Newton, dual-titled Ph.D. candidate in Art Education and African and Diaspora Studies, and Xalli Zuniga, dual-titled Ph.D. candidate in Art Education and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, received $750 each for travel to Ghana for the CHALE WOTE Street Art Festival to present "Brs Bruxas: An Analysis of Performative Methodologies."
• Leslie Sotomayor, dual-titled Ph.D. candidate in Art Education and Women's Studies, received a travel grant to do archival research in May 2018 at the Gloria Anzaldua archives in Austin, Texas.