Dipti Desai

• Art and Art Professions
• Art Education

Dipti Desai is an Associate Professor and Director of the Art Education Program. Prior to coming to NYU, she taught art education at SUNY-New Paltz. Her teaching career involves two years in New Zealand, where she taught courses in Education at Victoria University in Wellington and extensive experience teaching students from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds at the elementary and middle school level in the United States, India, and New Zealand. As a scholar and artist-educator she is committed to addressing the formative role of visual representation and its politics in order to affect social change. Her work has examined the ways visual representation construct meanings about culture in schools nad its implications for pedagogical practice. Focusing on contemporary art practices as a pedagogical site, she is examining the relationship between incarceration and immigration, in particular the prison industrial complex and the immigration industrial complex. She has initiated the Visual Culture and the Criminal Justice Initiative, which is a curricular-based program that focuses on documenting the experiences of youth involved in the criminal justice system and empowering them to advocate for their rights through the visual arts. This initiative will house several projects. She has published several articles in art education journals on the politics of multicultural art education, critical pedagogy, and social justice art education. She serves on the editorial board of several journals in art education and is the Associate Editor for the Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education. Currently, she is working on a book “Image as History, History as Image: Visual Knowledge and History in the Classroom” that will be published by Routledge in 2009.