Barbara Bickel is an artist, researcher, and educator. An Associate Professor of Art Education Emerita at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, USA she teaches and understands art as an inquiry and interdisciplinary meaning making process. She co-founded and currently is co-artistic director of Studio M*: A collaborative research creation lab intersecting arts, culture & healing in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. 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, the body, 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 and active member of
the Gestare Art Collective (2009-).
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 co-edited a book, with Susan Walsh & Carl Leggo, entitled Arts-Based & Contemplative Practices in Research & Teaching . She is co-founder and former Editor in Chief of a new book series called 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.
