Barbara Bickel is an artist, researcher, editor and educator. With an understanding art as spirit, she practices and teaches art as co-inquiry and interdisciplinary meaning making process. She co-founded and is currently co-artistic director of Studio M*: A collaborative research creation lab intersecting arts, culture & healing in Nanaimo, BC, Canada. She is core Faculty at Southwestern College, Santa Fe, NM, and Emerita Associate Professor of Art Education at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, USA. 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, a/r/tography, collaboration, socially engaged art, connective aesthetics, spirituality, feminist art & pedagogy, matrixial theory, 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, moving 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 Gallery 3342 (2014 - 17), a women, gender and sexuality focused gallery at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale Illinois. She is a co-founding member of
the Gestare Art Collective (2009-2021).
She has had 29 solo art exhibitions and presented her art and arts-based writing at over 80 peer reviewed conferences and 30 invited presentations. She is author of Art, Ritual and Trance Inquiry: Arational Learning in an Irrational World and co-author of Art-Care Practices for Restoring the Communal: Education, Co-Inquiry and Healing with R. Michael Fisher. She is co-editor of two books: Arts-based Educational Research Trajectories with Rita L. Irwin and Richard Siegesmund and Arts-Based & Contemplative Practices in Research & Teaching with Susan Walsh & Carl Leggo. She is co-founder and former Editor in Chief of the book series entitled Studies in Arts Based Educational Research with Springer Press and co-founder and senior co-editor of the open access journal Artizein: Arts & Teaching Journal. Her articles on arts-based inquiry have been published in 16 book chapters and 29 peer reviewed journals, such as the Journal of Arts and Community, Visual Culture and Gender, International Journal for Education in the Arts, International Journal of Qualitative Research, and the Journal of Arts & Communities.
