Biography
Barbara Bickel is an artist, researcher, and educator. An Assistant Professor in Art Education and Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, USA she teaches art as an inquiry and meaning making process in the School of Art and Design. Her arts-based Ph.D. in Art Education from The University of British Columbia, Canada was awarded the Arts Based Educational Research Outstanding Dissertation Award from the American Educational Research Association (ABER SIG) in 2009. Her art and research interests include arts-based inquiry methods, collaboration, community-based art, the body, relational aesthetics, spirituality, feminism, women’s leadership, and restorative and transformative learning.
Since graduating in 1993 with a BFA in Painting from the University of Calgary, Canada she has had a multi-media studio practice (drawing, collage, painting, sculpture, experimental video, sound and time-based installation), been an exhibiting and performance ritual artist, as well as an independent curator, gallery director and arts educator in Canada and the US. She co-founded The Centre Gallery (1995-2001), a non-profit women’s focused gallery in Calgary, Alberta, and most recently is a co-founding and active member of the Gestare Art Collective (2010 -). She has had 25 solo art exhibitions and presented her art and writing at over 40 peer reviewed conferences. Her articles on arts-based inquiry have been published in 5 book chapters and 17 peer reviewed journals, such as the International Journal of Qualitative Research, Visual Culture and Gender, International Journal for Education in the Arts, and the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy. |  Photograph by Eva Tihanyi
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