About

Ann Holt, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of art education at Penn State. She is an advisor and artist teacher with Arts Action Group, an international community-based collective dedicated to facilitating arts initiatives with children and youth in conflict-affected environments. Holt serves as research coordinator of the National Art Education Association (NAEA) Women’s Caucus and acts as an NAEA liaison to NYSATA’s ED&I task force. Her research, teaching, and writing focus on social justice issues involving marginalized art education histories, arts and culture in global development, social transformation, and healing, as well as research on and with archives to broaden understanding about engaging art education archival records. She has conducted studies on Penn State’s art education history, including the life of Mary E. Godfrey, Penn State’s first African American full-time faculty member, and the activism and pedagogy of Lowenfeld at Hampton. Holt recently co-edited a book on arts and culture in global development practice and co-authored a publication on teaching and assessing social justice in art education. She holds a B.F.A. in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, an M.A. in art education from Concordia University in Montreal, and completed her doctoral work in art education with a minor in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Penn State, exploring a feminist transdisciplinary orientation to the Judy Chicago Art Education Collection. Her artmaking encompasses a variety of materials and responds to her lived experience, research, and teaching.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Mathematics education
• Engineering ethics
• Pedagogy
• Psychology
• Engineering
• Law
• Criminology

Selected publications

• A wicked problem: The rising tide of pollution at Ilavalai Beach, Sri Lanka

  International Journal of Education through Art · 2025-02-19

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article describes practice-led research focused on a teaching project in Ilavalai, Sri Lanka that involves socially engaged art (SEA) and science, technology, engineering, art and math (STEAM) workshops centred around a local community challenge, or, ‘a wicked problem’, in this case, the community issue of ocean and beach pollution. The project explores questions around how art can be a vehicle for hope, resilience, rebuilding lives and community towards visioning, building, recovering futures as a cultural capacity. Theoretical underpinnings guiding the research and teaching in the context of place are connected to future-making through artful coalitions that decentre definitions of (D)development and (C)culture. The article details the workshop processes including images and videos of student work and concludes with a reflection on how using SEA and STEAM in a development context, side-by-side with partners, can support and empower communities in aspiring to and imagining hopeful, healthy and meaningful futures.

  PublisherDOI

• Remembering Kosovo: An Artist’s Fight for Peace in Times of War and Prolonged Oppression

  Art Education · 2025-05-04

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Inspire Decolonial Actions

  2022-07-19

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Teaching and Assessing Social Justice Art Education

  2022 · 3 citations

  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  This incisive and wholly practical book offers a hands-on guide to developing and assessing social justice art education for K–12 art educators by providing theoretically grounded, social justice art education assessment strategies. Recognizing the increased need to base the K–12 curriculum in social justice education, the authors ground the book in six social justice principles–conceptualized through art education–to help teachers assess and develop curriculum, design pedagogy, and foster social justice learning environments. From encouraging teachers to be upstanders to injustice to engaging in decolonial action, this book provides a thorough guide to facilitating and critiquing social justice art education and engaging in reflexive praxis as educators. Rich in examples and practical application, this book provides a clear pathway for art educators to connect social justice art education with real-life educational assessment expectations: 21st-century learning, literacy, social skills, teacher performance-based assessment, and National Core Art Standards, making this text an invaluable companion to art educators and facilitators alike

  PublisherDOI

• Assess Social Justice Art Education

  2022-07-19

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Dismantle Power Differentials

  2022-07-19

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Decenter White Patriarchal Norms 1

  2022-07-19

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Become Upstanders to Injustice

  2022-07-19

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Arts and Culture in Global Development Practice

  2022-02-03 · 3 citations

  bookSenior author

  Rethinking Development menawarkan ikhtisar topik-topik kontemporer yang dapat diakses dan merangsang pemikiran dalam pembangunan dan bantuan internasional. Memberikan wawasan empiris dan analitis asli, buku-buku dalam seri ini mendorong pemikiran ke arah baru dengan menantang konseptualisasi saat ini dan mengembangkan yang baru. Ini adalah seri yang dinamis dan menginspirasi bagi semua orang yang terlibat dalam perdebatan hari ini seputar isu-isu pembangunan, baik itu mahasiswa, cendekiawan, pembuat kebijakan, dan praktisi internasional. Buku-buku interdisipliner ini menyediakan sumber yang tak ternilai untuk diskusi dalam program sarjana dan pascasarjana tingkat lanjut dalam studi pembangunan serta dalam antropologi, ekonomi, politik, geografi, studi media, dan sosiologi.

  PublisherDOI

• Investigate Systemic Oppression

  2022-07-19

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Karen Keifer‐Boyd

  Pennsylvania State University

  13 shared

• Wanda B. Knight

  Pennsylvania State University

  13 shared

• Cheri E. Ehrlich

  11 shared

• Yen-Ju Lin

  RELX Group (United States)

  11 shared

• Adetty Pérez de Miles

  11 shared

• Patricia Hswe

  2 shared

• Eric Robinson

  University of Liverpool

  1 shared

• Mike Harding

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Art Education

  Penn State