March 26, 2024

Jen Katz-Buonincontro, PhD, professor for the School of Education, was recently recognized by the American Educational Research Association with the Outstanding Achievement Award for Arts and Learning Special Interest Group. Dr. Katz-Buonincontro’s work forges new educational opportunities that widen knowledge about the impact of American artists and their experiences for educators and students and expand scholarship on the value of the arts for catalyzing creative problem solving in leadership development. Grants in this area include the U.S. Department of Education Arts in Innovation Program, the Windgate Foundation and Mellon Foundation. One strand of her research agenda includes working with community research partner Allan Edmunds, former CEO, and now Michele Parchment, CEO of Brandywine Workshop & Archives in Philadelphia, PA on three projects: a visual arts educational resource called Artura.org, a new online course called the CREST Culturally relevant and sustaining teaching in the arts, and a Teacher’s Guide which will be supported this spring by the Mellon Foundation. This collaboration expands learning exposure to artists representing diverse print-based mediums and clarifies the relationship between cultural, racial, and gendered experiences to creative identity.

Dr. Katz-Buonincontro will also serve as a visiting scholar to Princeton University’s Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education, the university’s hub for entrepreneurship. As a visiting scholar, she will collaborate with the new Humanistic Design program at the center. The center works with field experts to teach students and faculty the requisite creativity and design thinking knowledge and resources that aid in the development of their learning and research to produce socially valuable projects. The program will draw on her internationally recognized expertise in creativity and learning to research designing thinking process in two areas: how instructor feedback affects the ability to develop creative growth mindsets and secondly, how student intersectional identities relate to team creativity.

Dr. Katz Buonincontro joined Drexel in 2009. You can read her bio, publications, and research interests here.