Marissa is an educator & interdisciplinary artist currently based in the Southwestern United States. She conceptualizes her art-making as both practice and play folding into everyday life, with creative experimentation as a central goal. She is intrigued by cross-disciplinary collaboration, letters & their adjacent histories (calligraphy, bookmaking, signs, poetry), and intersections of performance art with other artistic disciplines. Prevalent themes in her work include the body, mental health, time, memory, and the natural world, and she has been a collaborator/performer in multiple large scale immersive performances.
Over the last seven years, she has focused the majority of her energy into arts education, working with elementary-age youth through after-school arts programming, and working towards her Masters in Teaching from the Art Education department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has experience working with pre-k through college freshmen in a diverse set of contexts. In addition to more traditional skill building, core parts of her teaching praxis include creative experimentation, process oriented projects, and the cultivation of a safe, generative, emotionally supportive learning space for students. She is deeply motivated by educational models that deconstruct the hierarchy between teacher and student and emphasize choice, youth autonomy, and social justice. From 2017 until her move to Chicago in 2021, she also helped found and co-organized a radical social-justice oriented program for middle school aged youth in Portland, OR that takes inspiration from anarchist pedagogy and alternative education models such as democratic free schools, among others. Her politics, teaching practice, and art making are all deeply connected, and inform each other. She believes that play and joy in learning is necessary for a liberatory and empowering pedagogy, but also she just loves to have fun. She can’t wait to play outside and put her hands in some dirt with you.
**CV available upon request