Karen Keifer-Boyd, Ph.D., Professor of Art Education and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Pennsylvania State University, co-authored several books: Including Difference (NAEA, 2013); InCITE, InSIGHT, InSITE (NAEA, 2008); Engaging Visual Culture (Davis, 2007); co-edited Real-World Readings in Art Education: Things Your Professors Never Told You (Falmer, 2000); and has numerous journal publications. Her research on transdisciplinary creativity, inclusion, feminist art pedagogy, visual culture, cyberart activism, transcultural dialogue, action research, and eco-social justice art education has been translated and published in Austria, Brazil, China, Columbia, Finland, Oman, and S. Korea. In her chapter Creativity, Disability, Diversity and Inclusion in the Handbook of Arts Education and Special Education (Routledge, 2018), she draws on Disabilities Studies theory and practices that change attitudes and environments to create an inclusive world of difference.

Co-founder and editor of Visual Culture & Gender, she has received Fulbright Awards (2012 Distinguished Chair in Gender Studies at Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria; and Finland, 2006) and residencies (Austria, 2009; Uganda, 2010); and several National Art Education Association (NAEA) awards including the Eisner Lifetime Achievement Award and is an NAEA Distinguished Fellow Class of 2013. Her lifetime work is based on her deep belief that visual art is integral to forming subjectivity, community, agency, and enacting social change. Visual art is also a powerful way to interpret histories, concepts, and experiences. Socially engaged participatory art can develop human potentials for dialogue, empathy, personal and collective healing, and can create solutions to nuanced and complex eco-social justice issues, documenting, and exploring beliefs, theories, and histories.

She is a recipient of a National Art Education Foundation grant (2017-2018) for social justice art education and a National Science Foundation grant (2010-2012) regarding gender barriers in technology. Since 2011, she has conceptualized, developed, and maintained an interactive online archive to support Penn State’s Special Collections’ Judy Chicago Art Education Collection, and since 2016, she has developed online curricular encounters with art, which is incorporated into Penn State’s Special Collection of the Linda Stein Art Education Collection.