Kathy J. Brown

Assistant Professor, Art Education
Director, Art Education Undergraduate Studies
Department of Art Education
940-369-7559
Kathy.Brown@unt.edu
Art Building, Room 262C

Kathy J. Brown teaches undergraduate- and graduate-level courses in the Department of Art Education of the UNT College of Visual Art and Design. Prior appointments include a visiting professorship at Texas Woman’s University, Denton, Texas, and a career as a K-8 art educator. Among her many accomplishments as a K-8 teacher, several of her students were recognized in prestigious regional art competitions, she created and implemented school-wide programming such as Young Woman’s Empowerment Day, and held a one-year advisory board seat for the non-profit The Power of Girlhood in Detroit, Mich.

In 2018, Brown completed her Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction and a graduate certificate in museum education from The University of Houston, Houston, Texas. As a teaching fellow, she taught art methods courses for pre-service generalists and was selected for a 2016-2017 Future Faculty Fellow (F3) award. Her instruction informed her autoethnographic dissertation, which employed Clandinin & Connelly’s (2000) three-dimensional narrative inquiry space of time, socio-personal and place.  As a result, critical qualitative research and experiential storytelling informed by Critical Race Theory (Ladson-Billings & Tate,1995) frame her current methodological choices. Brown’s research interests include social justice art education, anti-blackness in education, pre-service and in-service teacher experiences, critical inquiry in the urban art room, visual culture and race, K-12 /higher education border crossings, self-studies in teacher education, Afrofuturism in art education, post+colonial (La Paperson, 2010) thought and diversity in the field. Her current projects include a collaborative, three-part, rhizomatic self-study exploring the use of the 5E lesson-planning model in art teacher education, an afro-autoethnography and a series of Afrofuturistic fibers projects as arts-based research.

Brown has presented at several conferences such as the International Visual Literacy Conference in Montreal, Canada; Texas Art Education Association; the National Association of African American Studies; and the Social Justice + Art Education Symposium on topics such as art dialogue as racialized discourse, Visual Thinking Strategies in the PK-16 classroom, and social justice art education. In spring 2021, she will present a paper at the American Educational Research Association and co-presenting (via video recording) a collaborative emerging research project, HairEthnographies: Hair as a Metaphor for Agency, Power and Identity at the National Art Education Association Virtual Conference. 

Recently, her hand-sewn fibers piece, a “garment” of African-inspired and African-printed fabrics titled “Clothes You Can’t Remove: Pre and Post Breonna Taylor,” was accepted to the 2021 Materials: Hard + Soft International Contemporary Craft Competition and Exhibition. The piece also won first place in its category at the Texas Art Education Association Annual Members Show.